Telegram bots are the fastest, cheapest way to send real-time notifications to yourself or your team. This guide covers creating a bot, getting your chat ID, and sending messages from any server or app.
In this guide
Open Telegram and message @BotFather. Type /newbot. Choose a display name and a username (must end in "bot"). BotFather gives you a token like 1234567890:ABCdef.... Store it as TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN in your .env. This token authenticates all API calls. Keep it secret — anyone with your token can send messages as your bot.
Start a conversation with your new bot (search its username and click Start). Then call: https://api.telegram.org/bot<TOKEN>/getUpdates. Find the "chat" object in the response — the id field (e.g., 123456789) is your chat ID. Store it as TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID. For group notifications, add the bot to a group and the group's chat ID will appear in getUpdates (group IDs are negative numbers).
From Node.js: await fetch(`https://api.telegram.org/bot${process.env.TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN}/sendMessage`, { method: "POST", headers: { "Content-Type": "application/json" }, body: JSON.stringify({ chat_id: process.env.TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID, text: "🚀 New booking from John Smith — Wednesday 3pm", parse_mode: "HTML" }) }). Or from bash: curl -s "https://api.telegram.org/bot$TOKEN/sendMessage?chat_id=$CHAT_ID&text=Server+is+down". No SDK needed.
Set parse_mode: "HTML" to use formatting in messages. Supported tags: <b>bold</b>, <i>italic</i>, <code>monospace</code>, <pre>code block</pre>, <a href="url">link</a>. Example: <b>New Lead</b>\n\n<b>Name:</b> John Smith\n<b>Email:</b> john@company.com\n<b>Budget:</b> $25,000\n<b>Source:</b> /book. This formats cleanly in the Telegram app on any device.
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