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Starting a bot ​

How to start a bot depends on the driver you are using.

INFO

More information about drivers you can find Drivers Page.

For example, if you are using the Telegram driver, you can use two ways to start the bot: long polling and webhook.

Telegram Long Polling ​

Long polling is the simplest way to start a bot. You just need to run the command:

sh
$ php artisan threadflow:telegram-polling --channel=my-telegram-channel

You can use it without any additional configuration. It's the best way to start a bot for testing purposes and local development.

Now your bot will start and listen for incoming messages.

WARNING

If you change the code of the bot, you need to restart the bot to apply the changes. Ctrl+C to stop the bot and run the command again.

TIP

You can use the --timeout option to specify the timeout in seconds. The default value is 30 seconds.

Telegram Webhook ​

The webhook method is the best way to start a bot in production. It's more efficient than long polling.

Webhook route setup ​

First, you need to set up a route to handle incoming messages from Telegram. You can change the route to any other route you want.

php
Route::post(
    '/thread-flow/webhook/telegram',
    \SequentSoft\ThreadFlowTelegram\Laravel\Controllers\WebhookHandleController::class
)->name('threadflow.telegram.webhook');

Also, you can add TELEGRAM_WEBHOOK_SECRET to your .env file to verify the incoming requests from Telegram.

TELEGRAM_WEBHOOK_SECRET="random-string-to-verify-webhook-requests"

To start a bot using a webhook, you need to configure the webhook URL in the Telegram API. But it requires a web server that have public address, and APP_URL in your .env file must be set to the public address of your application.

sh
$ php artisan threadflow:telegram-webhook-set --channel=my-telegram-channel

After that, telegram will send all messages to your application using the webhook.