If you want to use this repo as boilerplate, you can simply checkout on
telegram-bot-setup branch and move on! Just keep in mind that it was
created to host one bot on server. So that, our approach to generate
webhook urls doesn't handle multiple bots, but you can change this
behaviour in config/initializers/telegram_bot.rb file (and don't
forget to fix lib/tasks/webhooks.rake to create webhooks properly).
A few words about "our approach to generate webhook urls".
Telegram API documentation recommends
to use some sort of 'token' directly in webhook url, e.g.
https://my.site/my-awesome-token-qewrwtwdhsfhkjafsdk. But we couldn't
find how to do it with telegram-bot gem we use. So we changed
approach from this (the default):
/telegram/1111111_AAAA-AAAAAA-AAAAA
where you can find a slightly changed token of your telegram bot, to this:
/t/<bot-webhooks-token>/webhook.
We think it a bit more secure and configurable, since that token is
simply living at BOT_WEBHOOKS_TOKEN environment variable or in .env file.
Telegram Bot development requires at-least https self-signed sertificate. But instead of creating this sertificate and long tuning your machine to work with it, you can simply use ngrok.
Just register, download and start it with following command, alongside with rails server.
./ngrok http 3000
It will work just fine BUT don't forget to specify ngrok url in .env.
# .env
...
DOMAIN=https://123abcd.ngrok.io
...
After you specify this variable simply run rails webhooks:set to set the
webhook on that domain.
This project contains 3 predefined tasks:
rake webhooks:remove # Remove webhook for app
rake webhooks:set # Set webhook for app
rake webhooks:status # Get information about hook