node-telegram-bot VS telegraf

Congratulations! You have created your first Telegram bot. You can find the code on GitHub.

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

Today the most popular ways to build telegram chat bots in node js are Telegraf and Node-Telegram-Bot-Api. The second is more popular by weekly downloads(250.000), but in this post I don't want to equalize them by stats. I want to talk about my experience with them, in which cases I used them and show you really nice guide, especially for Telegraf, cause they haven't readable docs for newbies or people who don't use typescript.