Telegram Webhook Integration in 7 Easy Steps

Teams building chatbots, community monitoring tools, or customer support systems on Telegram often resort to polling the API every few seconds. This approach burns through rate limits, misses messages during outages, and creates brittle pipelines that break when traffic spikes.

Telegram webhooks solve this by pushing updates to your endpoint the moment they happen. Instead of asking "any new messages?" repeatedly, Telegram tells you when something arrives. This guide walks through setting up a Telegram webhook in seven steps, from creating a bot to routing event data into your warehouse.

TL;DR: Telegram Webhook Integration at a Glance

• Telegram pushes events (messages, button clicks, membership changes) to your HTTPS endpoint in real-time instead of you polling for updates
• Setup time is under an hour for most teams, following seven steps from bot creation to error handling
• Requirements: A Telegram bot token from @BotFather, a publicly accessible HTTPS endpoint with valid SSL, and basic HTTP knowledge
• Key advantage is sub-second latency and no wasted API calls compared to polling intervals of seconds or minutes

What Is a Telegram Webhook and Why Does It Matter?

A Telegram webhook is a URL endpoint that receives HTTP POST requests from Telegram's servers whenever an event occurs. These events include new messages, button clicks, inline queries, and membership changes.

How Webhooks Differ from Polling

With polling, your system repeatedly asks Telegram "any new messages?" even when nothing has changed. This wastes API calls, risks hitting rate limits, and introduces latency since you're only checking at fixed intervals.

Webhooks flip this model. Telegram tells you "here's a new message" the moment it happens. Your system stays idle until there's actual work to do.

The latency difference is significant. Polling typically introduces seconds to minutes of delay depending on your polling interval. Webhooks deliver events in sub-second timeframes. You also eliminate idle requests that burn compute resources for no value.

Common Use Cases for Telegram Webhooks

Telegram webhooks are commonly used in:

• Customer support bots: Route messages to CRM or ticketing systems instantly
• Community analytics: Track engagement, member growth, and message patterns in real-time
• Alerting systems: Forward notifications from Telegram groups to Slack, email, or dashboards
• Order and transaction tracking: E-commerce bots pushing order updates to warehouse systems
• Content moderation: Real-time flagging of messages for review

What Do You Need Before Setting Up a Telegram Webhook?

Before setting up a Telegram webhook, you need these things: 

• Telegram bot: Created via @BotFather 
• Bot token: The API key BotFather provides, formatted like 123456789:ABC‍
• HTTPS endpoint: A server or service with a valid SSL certificate (self-signed certificates won't work)‍
• Domain or public IP: Telegram must reach your endpoint from the internet‍
• Optional: ngrok or similar tool for local development and testing before production deployment

How Do You Set Up a Telegram Webhook in 7 Steps?

The setup process moves from bot creation through endpoint configuration to verification. Each step builds on the previous, so work through them in order.

1. Create Your Telegram Bot

Open Telegram and search for @BotFather. Send the /newbot command and follow the prompts to name your bot. BotFather will return a bot token that looks like this:

Done! Congratulations on your new bot. You will find it at t.me/YourBotName.
Use this token to access the HTTP API:
123456789:ABCdefGHIjklMNOpqrsTUVwxyz

Save this token somewhere secure. You'll need it for every subsequent step. Never commit tokens to version control.

2. Prepare Your Webhook Endpoint

Your endpoint must accept POST requests at the URL you'll register with Telegram. It needs to return HTTP 200 OK quickly since Telegram retries on failures. HTTPS is required with a valid SSL certificate from a trusted certificate authority. Let's Encrypt works fine for this.

Here's a minimal Python/Flask example:

from flask import Flask, request

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/telegram-webhook', methods=['POST'])
def handle_webhook():
    update = request.get_json()
    # Process the update
    print(update)
    return 'OK', 200

3. Register the Webhook with Telegram

Use Telegram's setWebhook API method to register your endpoint. Replace the placeholders with your actual bot token and endpoint URL:

curl -X POST "https://api.telegram.org/bot<YOUR_BOT_TOKEN>/setWebhook" \
  -d "url=https://yourdomain.com/telegram-webhook"

A successful registration returns:

{"ok":true,"result":true,"description":"Webhook was set"}

Telegram validates your SSL certificate during this registration step. If you see certificate errors, verify that your certificate is from a trusted CA and hasn't expired.

4. Configure Webhook Parameters (Optional but Recommended)

You can fine-tune webhook behavior with additional parameters:

curl -X POST "https://api.telegram.org/bot<YOUR_BOT_TOKEN>/setWebhook" \
  -d "url=https://yourdomain.com/telegram-webhook" \
  -d "allowed_updates=[\"message\",\"callback_query\"]" \
  -d "secret_token=your_secret_string"

The allowed_updates parameter filters which event types trigger the webhook, reducing noise if you only care about specific events. The max_connections parameter controls concurrent connections (1-100, default 40). The secret_token parameter adds an authentication header for security validation on your end.

5. Verify the Webhook Is Active

Use getWebhookInfo to confirm registration and check for any issues:

curl "https://api.telegram.org/bot<YOUR_BOT_TOKEN>/getWebhookInfo"

The response tells you everything about your webhook's status:

If pending_update_count keeps growing, your endpoint isn't processing updates fast enough or is returning errors.

6. Test with a Real Message

Send a message to your bot in Telegram and check your endpoint logs for the incoming payload. The JSON structure follows Telegram's Update object format:

{
  "update_id": 123456789,
  "message": {
    "message_id": 1,
    "from": {"id": 12345, "first_name": "User"},
    "chat": {"id": 12345, "type": "private"},
    "date": 1234567890,
    "text": "Hello bot!"
  }
}

If nothing arrives, check that your firewall or security group isn't blocking inbound HTTPS traffic on port 443.

7. Handle Errors and Retries

Telegram retries failed deliveries with exponential backoff. After repeated failures over several hours, Telegram disables the webhook entirely. Monitor pending_update_count via getWebhookInfo to catch problems early.

Your code should handle the reality that the same update_id may arrive twice:

• Return 200 quickly: Don't block the response while processing. Queue the work and respond immediately.
• Log everything: Store raw payloads before processing for debugging.
• Handle duplicates: Use update_id to detect and skip reprocessed messages.
• Set up alerting: Monitor for webhook failures before Telegram gives up on delivery.

How Do You Route Telegram Webhook Data to Your Data Warehouse?

Once messages flow into your endpoint, you need to move them somewhere useful: a data warehouse, analytics platform, or operational database.

Manual Approach vs. Managed Pipelines

The manual approach means writing custom code to transform and load data into your warehouse. This works for simple cases, but you own the maintenance burden. Schema changes, error handling, retry logic, and connection pooling all become your responsibility.

A managed approach uses a data integration platform to handle extraction, transformation, and loading. This reduces custom code and handles common failure scenarios automatically.

Moving Telegram Data with Airbyte

Airbyte's connectors let you ingest event data from Telegram and route it to Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, or your preferred destination without building custom loaders.

Define your schema once, and Airbyte handles incremental syncs automatically. You don't need to manage retry logic, schema evolution, or connection pooling yourself. When Telegram updates their API or your destination schema changes, you're not scrambling to update custom code.

For teams scaling beyond a handful of pipelines, Airbyte Plus offers fixed annual pricing with accelerated support and all 600+ connectors included. Organizations managing 50+ data sources across multiple teams can talk to sales about capacity-based pricing that doesn't penalize data growth.

What's the Fastest Way to Get Started with Telegram Webhooks?

Telegram webhooks replace polling overhead with push-based delivery, giving you real-time access to messages and events. To move Telegram data into your warehouse without building custom pipelines, try Airbyte free and connect your first data source in minutes.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I Use Both Webhooks and Polling Simultaneously?

No. Telegram only supports one method at a time per bot. Setting a webhook automatically disables getUpdates polling. To switch back to polling, delete the webhook by calling setWebhook with an empty URL.

What Happens If My Webhook Endpoint Goes Down?

Telegram queues updates and retries delivery with exponential backoff. After enough failures over several hours, Telegram stops sending updates to that webhook. Check pending_update_count via getWebhookInfo to see how many messages are queued. Once your endpoint recovers, Telegram delivers the queued updates.

Is There a Rate Limit on Telegram Webhooks?

Telegram limits you to 30 messages per second when sending to the same group, but webhook delivery itself isn't throttled the same way as outbound API calls. High-volume bots should still design for traffic bursts, especially if you're processing messages from multiple busy groups simultaneously.

Do I Need a Dedicated Server for Webhooks?

Not necessarily. Serverless functions like AWS Lambda or Google Cloud Functions work well for webhook endpoints. The main consideration is cold start times. If your function takes several seconds to spin up, you might hit timeout failures. Keep your handler lightweight and consider provisioned concurrency for production workloads.

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