Setup Telegram bot to get alert notifications (2024)

Navratan Lal Gupta

Published in

Linux Shots

6 min read

Mar 19, 2023

Create a Telegram bot

A telegram bot is born from his father, which is another bot which creates bots.

Search for botfather in telegram and open its chat. Make sure it has blue tick to confirm its authenticity.

Setup Telegram bot to get alert notifications (4)

2. To list all the available options/commands, type /start in chatbox. It will list all the available command you can send to botfather.

Setup Telegram bot to get alert notifications (5)

3. Send /newbot to create a bot. This command may change in future. So always refer the output of /start command first.

Send message to chat using bot

To send a message to chat using chat, We need to use Telegram Bot API. Here, I will be using curl on Linux bash shell to make the API call. Any other available tool or programming language can also be used like Potsman, Golang, Python or any other.

To send message, Use below command on Linux

curl -X POST https://api.telegram.org/bot<bot-api-token>/sendMessage -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"chat_id": "<chat-id>", "text": "<Your Message>"}'

Replace <bot-api-token> with telegram bot’s HTTP token, <chat-id> with chat id fetched in previous step and <Your Message> with your message.

After running this, You should be receiving the message from bot in your chat box.

Setup Telegram bot to get alert notifications (9)

Setup Telegram bot to get alert notifications (10)

Use Cases:

1. Receive Alert to Telegram when root volume of server is getting full

Lets write a simple script which will check root volume size and used space. If used space is greater than 80%, It should send a alert to telegram.

Create a bash script file root-volume-alert.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash
used_space_perc=$(df -h / | tail -1 | tr -s " " | cut -d " " -f 5 | tr -d "%")
if [ $used_space_perc -gt 80 ]; then
 curl -X POST https://api.telegram.org/bot<bot-api-token>/sendMessage -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"chat_id": "<chat-id>", "text": "ALERT! Root volume is about to be full. Current usage is $used_space_perc %"}'
fi

Execute this script using cron every 30 min.

crontab -e# Add below line to execute it every 30 minutes
0,30 * * * * bash /path/to/script/root-volume-alert.sh

That’s it.

2. Setup Telegram notification in uptime Kuma

Uptime Kuma is an opensource self-hosted tool used to check health status of our applications or servers and send alert.

Login to uptime kuma and open settings.
Click on Notifications and Setup Notification
Choose Notification Type as Telegram and add bot token and Chat id in respective fields.

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3. Send telegram notification using Golang program

Telegram bot can also be utilized in any application or tool developed using Golang. Below snippet of a Go function sends a Telegram message to chatId.

// LICENSE// MIT License
// Copyright (c) 2023 Navratan Lal Gupta
// Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
// of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
// in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
// to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
// copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
// furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
// The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
// copies or substantial portions of the Software.
// THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
// IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
// FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
// AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
// LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
// OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
// SOFTWARE.
func SendTelegramNotification(botToken, chatId, message string) error {
 log.Println("Preparing to send Telegram notification")
 type reqBody struct {
 ChatId string `json:"chat_id"`
 Text string `json:"text"`
 }
 apiUrl := "https://api.telegram.org/bot" + botToken + "/sendMessage"
 // Create request
 var reqBodyValue reqBody
 reqBodyValue.ChatId = chatId
 reqBodyValue.Text = message
 reqBodyValueJson, err := json.Marshal(reqBodyValue)
 if err != nil {
 log.Println("Failed to send Telegram notification", err.Error())
 return err
 }
 requestBodyJson := bytes.NewReader(reqBodyValueJson)
 if err != nil {
 log.Println("Failed to send Telegram notification", err.Error())
 return err
 }
 req, err := http.NewRequest(http.MethodPost, apiUrl, requestBodyJson)
 if err != nil {
 log.Println("Failed to send Telegram notification", err.Error())
 return err
 }
 req.Header.Add("accept", "application/json")
 req.Header.Add("Content-Type", "application/json")
 // Create client
 client := http.Client{
 Timeout: 30 * time.Second,
 }
 // Make request
 res, err := client.Do(req)
 if err != nil {
 log.Println("Failed to send Telegram notification", err.Error())
 return err
 }
 if res.StatusCode/100 != 2 {
 log.Println("Failed to send Telegram notification", res.Status)
 return errors.New("Failed to send Telegram notification")
 }
 log.Println("Notification sent to Telegram")
 return nil
}

Similar way, Telegram bot can be used with Python, Java script or any other programming language. Many opensource tools come with feature to integrate Telegram notification.

You can read more about Telegram bot and its API here, https://core.telegram.org/bots/

Hope this article helped you know more about telegram bots. Don’t forget to clap if you liked it.

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Thanks