This example provides an telegram bot, based on the .NET Core framework. Feel free to use it as scaffold for your own bot projects.
This is an short description how you can test your bot locally. The description presumes that you already have a bot and it’s token. If not, please create one. You’ll find several explanations on the internet how to do this.
At first you have to set your own token in the appsettings.json. For this, replace in the appsettings.json with the token that belongs to your bot.
"BotConfiguration": {
"BotToken": "<BotToken>"
}
In appsettings.Development.json you can provide the token of a dev bot, if you like to have two separated. If not, you have to remove the BotToken section.
Ngrok gives you the opportunity to access your local machine from a temporary subdomain provided by ngrok. This domain can later send to the telegram API as URL for the webhook. Install ngrock from this page ngrok - download or via homebrew cask
brew cask install ngrok
and start ngrok on port 8443.
ngrok http 8443
Telegram API only supports the ports 443, 80, 88 or 8443. Feel free to change the port in the config of the project.
From ngrok you get an URL to your local server. It’s important to use the https one. You can post this url als form-data (key: url, value: https://yoursubdomain.ngrok.io/api/update) to the telegram api.
https://api.telegram.org/botYourBotToken/setWebhook
Be aware of the bot prefix in front of your bot token in the URL.
Now you can start the Bot in a local instance. Check if the port of the application matches the port on which ngrok is running.
Now your bot should answer with the text from every message you send to it.