The Concierge

The Concierge allows you to create a simple project for the development of a ready-to-use Telegram Bot.

The Concierge hides all the configuration part and allows you to use all your imagination in the business logic of the Telegram Bot.

All you have to do is put the handlers in the handlers folder and specify them in the settings file.

Requirements

The Concierge is based on the Telethon package. It is a very useful Python package that allows you to use a Telegram MTProto API.

The purpose of The Concierge is to create a simple and flexible template for rapid prototyping of a Telegram Bot based on Telethon package.

Below, a list of all required packages:

• Telethon

  pip install telethon

• TheConcierge

  pip install theconcierge

Quick-start

Before you start programming your bot, you need to get the Telegram App API Id and App API Hash. You can retrieve these data on the official Telegram website when you create an application. For more info see the following link.

To get the token needed for the bot, you can visit the official telegram website which explains how to use BotFather.

The structure of your project is as follows:

<PROJECT ROOT>
    |
    +-- handlers
    |   +-- <SOME HANDLER>.py
    +-- settings
    |   +-- settings.json
    +-- <MAIN>.py

If you want, you can see TheConciergeTemplate for a template to start with. Otherwise, you can run this command:

python -m theconcierge

This command downloads the template seen above in the current folder of your OS.

Perfect, now you can start programming your Bot.

Handlers

The handlers folder contains all the handlers that the bot needs to work.

An handler is a function that will execute when it occurs some events, example a NewMessage, ChatAction and other (the events is specified into Telethon package, see your documentation for more details).

Simple handler look like this:

@events.register(events.NewMessage(pattern="(?i)hi|hello"))
async def random_handler(event):
    await event.respond("Hey!")

One important note is that Telethon is based on asyncio package that allow you run Telegram Bot in async mode, then you must defined your handler function with async and use event methods with await.
All is explained on official Telethon documentation.

Settings

The settings folder is not request by Telethon, but by The Concierge.

Inside the settings folder there is the settings.json file which contains all the data necessary for The Concierge to register all the handlers automatically, simply by specifying the name of the module and the functions in question.

An example:

...

"handlers": {
    "echo": [
        "simple_echo_handler",
        "complex_echo_handler"
    ],
    "welcome": [
        "welcome_italian",
        "walcome_english"
    ]
}

...

Note: All handlers in the setting.json will load, if an handler isn't into settings.json, this handler won't load.

In settings.json there is also a field system where you can insert your api_id, api_hash and bot_token. The Concierge will load them automatically.

Finally there is a app field into settings.json for all data app that you can needed.

Main

The main is the file where you can launch you bot.

from theconcierge import TheConcierge

def main():
    concierge = TheConcierge()
    concierge.start_bot()

main()

This is the bare minimum needed to launch your Telegram Bot based on Telethon and The Concierge.