Hey everyone, especially those of you who are reading these posts and sticking around with me!
For a few years now I've been writing Telegram bots on top of the Django codebase I already had lying around, but at some point I thought — why not just turn this into a proper package? It'd be easier to install and you could get moving on your work way faster.
So that's how dj_telegram_bot came to be — forked from a friend's project, and I pushed it everywhere it needed to go
First stop: Why, why, and... why?
A question that probably crosses everyone's mind:
- Why should I use this?
- What's actually the point?
- What does it even have over the alternatives?
Well, here are a few advantages, and there will be more in future versions.
1 - Simplicity and convenience: if you've worked with Django before, you can build a bot here faster than a "hello world" project 😁 Django's admin panel and ORM handle a ton of the work for you.
2 - Custom admin panel: there's a section of the admin panel built specifically for this library — you can easily add message text and create InlineKeyboardMarkup or ReplyKeyboardMarkup for them.
3 - Type-safe and ready to go: Telegram types are fully validated with pydantic, so you get helpful error hints right in your editor, plus there are some built-in defaults like a sponsor channel and bot status settings.
4 - Flexibility: you can very easily send monitoring, logging, and notifications from your Django site over to Telegram.
Second stop: how do you actually write a bot with it?
Since it's structured as a Django app, to work with it you need to build a Django project first; then add the library to INSTALLED_APPS, You'll also need your own Django app (e.g., created with django-admin startapp bot).
You can find the installation steps and more details either on the library's PyPI page or in the GitHub README!
Here are a few screenshots of how to build a simple bot (there's also a demo video on GitHub).
See how quick it is? This example is literally just copy-pasted from another bot of mine
The message-adding section in the admin panel
Sample bot code
Final bot output
In the example above, I realized changing the "step" is a bit annoying... it'd be better to have a service for the user with an update-step method and so on.
Oh, and the docs are still at version one — if I get the time, adding something with mkdocs would be nice.
If you found this interesting or useful, I'd really appreciate a star on the GitHub ⭐️
If you'd like, you're welcome to contribute to the docs!!
Thanks for sticking with me and reading all the way through, hope you're doing well. Cheers ❤️
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