telegram-bot

A starting point to create your own Telegram bot with Elixir.

👉 Development

A couple of helper scripts available under scripts/ to ease development on your local machine.

Working on the bot locally:

1. Register your Bot using Telegram's @BotFather and get the token.

2. Start ngrok on port 8080 by running ngrok http 8080 command. Ngrok will act as reverse proxy so Telegram could access your bot from the internet.

3. Create .env file and fill with environment variables that we'll pass to the app:

   BOT_HOST=<your-ngrok-subdomain-here>.ngrok.io
   BOT_TOKEN=<your-bot-token-here>
   

4. Start the bot with our helper script: ./script/dev. It will start an IEx shell (iex -S mix)

5. Start developing.

You'll want to update the lib/bot.ex to suit your need (handle messages or making replies).

👉 Deployment

It's up to you on how and where you want to deploy the bot. Here's how I deploy it to Fly.io as Docker container.

Prerequisites:

• Make sure you have an account at Fly.io
• Make sure you have fly CLI installed
• Make sure you're logged-in using fly auth login

Deploy steps:

1. Run fly launch and follow the steps (you only need to do this once and fly.toml file will be generated - see fly.toml.example)

2. Set bot environment variable as secrets:

   fly secrets set BOT_HOST=<your-fly-io-appname>.fly.dev
   fly secrets set BOT_TOKEN=<your-bot-token>
   

3. Run fly deploy to proceed with deployment.

Once finished, you will have the bot up and running and ready to accept messages.

👉 Demo bot

Open this link t.me/ElixirDemoBot and send /ping message, it will reply with pong!