Bot API

Telegram Bot API documentation

Bot API is a high-level HTTP interface to the Telegram API that makes it easy to develop bots. Under the hood, Bot API uses TDLib (which in turn uses MTProto API).

While the Bot API can only be used to work with bot accounts, the MTProto API can be used to work with both bot and user accounts. If you need to work with MTProto, we recommend you the mtcute library.

Calling the Bot API

You can call Telegram Bot API methods via bot.api or via the shorthand methods of contexts (for example, context.send is sendMessage shorthand)

const response = await bot.api.sendMessage({
    //
    //
    chat_id: "@gramio_forum",
    text: "some text",
});

bot.on("message", (context) =>
    context.send("This message will be sent to the current chat")
);

Suppressing errors

It can be convenient to handle an error on the spot without using try/catch blocks. That's why the suppress argument was created, which you can use in any API method.

const response = await bot.api.sendMessage({
    //
    //
    suppress: true,
    chat_id: "@not_found",
    text: "Suppressed method",
});

if (response instanceof TelegramError)
    console.error("sendMessage returns an error...");
else console.log("Message has been sent successfully");

Types

GramIO re-exports @gramio/types (Code-generated and Auto-published Telegram Bot API types).

Read more

import type { APIMethodParams, APIMethodReturn } from "gramio";

type SendMessageParams = APIMethodParams<"sendMessage">;
//

type GetMeReturn = APIMethodReturn<"getMe">;
//

For example you can use it in your custom function.

function myCustomSend(params: APIMethodParams<"sendMessage">) {
    params;
}

Types for suppressed method

import type {
    SuppressedAPIMethodParams,
    SuppressedAPIMethodReturn,
} from "gramio";

type SendMessageParams = SuppressedAPIMethodParams<"sendMessage">;
//

type GetMeReturn = SuppressedAPIMethodReturn<"getMe">;
//

Debugging

In order to debug which requests GramIO sends, you can set the environment variable to DEBUG=gramio:api:*

npx cross-env DEBUG=gramio:api:* node index.js

And you will see something like in the console:

gramio:api:getUpdates options: {"method":"POST","headers":{"Content-Type":"application/json"},"body":"{\"offset\":0,\"suppress\":true}"} +0ms
gramio:api:getUpdates response: {"ok":true,"result":[]} +49ms

also if you use Bun you can use BUN_CONFIG_VERBOSE_FETCH environment variable to log network requests. Read more.

BUN_CONFIG_VERBOSE_FETCH=curl bun src/index.ts

And logs will looks like:

[fetch] > HTTP/1.1 POST https://example.com/
[fetch] > content-type: application/json
[fetch] > Connection: keep-alive
[fetch] > User-Agent: Bun/1.1.14
[fetch] > Accept: */*
[fetch] > Host: example.com
[fetch] > Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br
[fetch] > Content-Length: 13

[fetch] < 200 OK
[fetch] < Accept-Ranges: bytes
[fetch] < Cache-Control: max-age=604800
[fetch] < Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
[fetch] < Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2024 05:12:07 GMT
[fetch] < Etag: "3147526947"
[fetch] < Expires: Tue, 25 Jun 2024 05:12:07 GMT
[fetch] < Last-Modified: Thu, 17 Oct 2019 07:18:26 GMT
[fetch] < Server: EOS (vny/044F)
[fetch] < Content-Length: 1256