telegram

name	telegram
description	Send and receive messages via the Telegram Bot API using curl

telegram

Instructions

Use this skill to interact with Telegram via the Bot API. All operations use curl against https://api.telegram.org/bot<TOKEN>/....

Prerequisites

The environment variable TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN must be set to a valid Telegram Bot API token (obtained from @BotFather). The variable TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID should be set to the target chat/group/channel ID for sending messages.

Sending a message

curl -s "https://api.telegram.org/bot${TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN}/sendMessage" \
  -d chat_id="${TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID}" \
  -d text="Hello from shellm" \
  -d parse_mode=Markdown

Sending a file/document

curl -s "https://api.telegram.org/bot${TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN}/sendDocument" \
  -F chat_id="${TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID}" \
  -F document=@/path/to/file.txt

Getting updates (receiving messages)

Poll for new messages using getUpdates. Use offset to acknowledge previously seen updates and only receive new ones.

# Get latest updates
curl -s "https://api.telegram.org/bot${TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN}/getUpdates" \
  -d limit=10 \
  -d timeout=0

# Acknowledge up to update_id 12345 and get only newer updates
curl -s "https://api.telegram.org/bot${TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN}/getUpdates" \
  -d offset=12346 \
  -d limit=10

Parse the JSON response with jq:

curl -s "https://api.telegram.org/bot${TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN}/getUpdates" \
  | jq -r '.result[] | "\(.update_id) \(.message.from.username): \(.message.text)"'

Replying to a specific message

curl -s "https://api.telegram.org/bot${TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN}/sendMessage" \
  -d chat_id="${TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID}" \
  -d text="Reply text" \
  -d reply_to_message_id=MESSAGE_ID

Getting chat info

curl -s "https://api.telegram.org/bot${TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN}/getChat" \
  -d chat_id="${TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID}" | jq .

Error handling

All Telegram API responses return JSON with an ok field. Check it:

response=$(curl -s "https://api.telegram.org/bot${TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN}/sendMessage" \
  -d chat_id="${TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID}" \
  -d text="test")
if [ "$(echo "$response" | jq -r '.ok')" != "true" ]; then
  echo "Telegram API error: $(echo "$response" | jq -r '.description')" >&2
fi

Rate limits

Telegram limits bots to ~30 messages/second to different chats, and ~20 messages/minute to the same chat. Add short delays between batch sends.