node-telegram-bot-api VS telegraf

Node.js Telegram Bot Library: https://github.com/yagop/node-telegram-bot-api

Hi, I am developing a telegram chatbot using node-telegram-bot - https://github.com/yagop/node-telegram-bot-api) in Node.js that requires getting the previous messages or chat history of the user and bot.

Of course, it's good to write API requests yourself. It reduces the dependency on third-party libraries and allows you to control the behavior of the code more. But when there are more such methods than twenty, it already increases the size of the code. It becomes difficult to manage all the logic. This is where third-party libraries(frameworks) come to the rescue. After choosing a language, you can consider the options of different libraries from the list here, on the official Telegram page. For JavaScript I recommend using node-telegram-bot-api and telegraf. For Python you can take pyTelegramBotAPI and aiogram(highly recommended).

We checked if our text is equal to our command and responded with message. It is all main logic from this package, more sendMessage methods or params you can see here. Also we used reply_markup option in which we can use our keyboard, which will be sent with our message. And then we can check if text equal to "en" we will change our language to english and response with message. In addition, if you have a question like can you send message without getting message from user - you can do it. All that you need is to save your user to database like MongoDB with chatId field and use something like express to make CRUD methods to send your message. Here is my example of this 'bot mailer':

The Telegram bot API is pretty convenient to setup. Installing node and npm via toltec then https://github.com/yagop/node-telegram-bot-api/ makes it even easier to get a bot running in minutes. The resulting minimal app running on the reMarkable uses less than 1% CPU and 110Mb of RAM. Here the /ls example shows the last modified file by xochtil but other functions could be added to wget a PDF or ePub then add it.

Telegraf as a library for interacting with Telegram bots

Simply use telegraf : https://telegraf.js.org/

this is pretty simple , you can create a bot yourself which simply listens for every message checks length and if exceeded deletes the message (bot must be added as admin ingroup and shows have read permission in bot settings) , I would suggest you to use https://github.com/telegraf/telegraf for the code,

In this project we will use the Telegraf library to create the bot. To install it, you can use the npm install command.

Changed the main library for working with telegram from https://telegraf.js.org to https://grammy.dev, updated the source code for better work with typings

Of course, it's good to write API requests yourself. It reduces the dependency on third-party libraries and allows you to control the behavior of the code more. But when there are more such methods than twenty, it already increases the size of the code. It becomes difficult to manage all the logic. This is where third-party libraries(frameworks) come to the rescue. After choosing a language, you can consider the options of different libraries from the list here, on the official Telegram page. For JavaScript I recommend using node-telegram-bot-api and telegraf. For Python you can take pyTelegramBotAPI and aiogram(highly recommended).

It’s an expressive type system, but ime it allows developers to go crazy on type interdependencies and general entanglement, so you can’t just go to the “header” and quickly figure out what your method or a return value really is, despite TS has structural typing.

E.g. look at this: https://github.com/telegraf/telegraf/blob/v4/src/telegram-ty...

The bot uses telegraf framework, which is an overlay for the original telegram api, which is a nightmare in code form.

Honestly I found their API one of the worst ones I've ever used. The documentation is lacking, and they have some unintuitive quirks like posting messages with http GET requests and randomly concatenating strings in params (botNAMEOFBOT anyone?).

I didn't enjoy using it without a third party library [1].

Sending a single message is easy, but using the rest of telegram's features is "meh" when using pure API calls.

If you want to see a well designed API, you should take a look at FTX or Stripe. I love those two :)

[1] https://telegraf.js.org