Django: a Telegram Bot with Authentication

How to integrate a Telegram bot inside your Django App

The problem

We want to create a Telegram bot that will be able to access the database.

If you simply write a function for the bot inside your Django app, how would you run it? You can't run it from the Django app, because it should be running in a separate process.

You can't run it from the normal Python app, because it needs access to the database.

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We will be using pyTelegramBotAPI

There are many libraries for Telegram bots in Python, but we will be using pyTelegramBotAPI.

Install

pip install pyTelegramBotAPI

Usage

import telebot

bot = telebot.TeleBot("TOKEN", parse_mode=None)
@bot.message_handler(commands=['start', 'help'])
def send_welcome(message):
	bot.reply_to(message, "Howdy, how are you doing?")

@bot.message_handler(func=lambda m: True)
def echo_all(message):
	bot.reply_to(message, message.text)

This is a simple example of a bot that replies to every message with the same message.

How to integrate the bot into Django

There are two directions when we are talking about bots:

1. The bot sends messages to the user (e.g. notifications)
2. The user sends messages to the bot (e.g. commands), and the bot replies if needed. This one needs a separate process for listening.

First, let's make the bot respond to the user (direction 2)

For this, we will write a Management Command.

Create a file management/commands/bot.py

import telebot
from django.core.management.base import BaseCommand
from telebot.types import Message

bot = telebot.TeleBot("API_CHUCK_NORRIS")

@bot.message_handler(commands=['start', 'help'])
def send_welcome(message: Message):
    bot.reply_to(message, "Howdy, how are you doing?")

@bot.message_handler(func=lambda m: True)
def echo_all(message: Message):
    bot.reply_to(message, message.text)

class Command(BaseCommand):
    help = "Run the…