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Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku – Part 1

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This entry is part 1 of 11 in the series Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku

Recently, I finished my first Django application ✌. Since it took me some time to find a proper starting point to wrap my head around the basics of Django well enough to actually do something with it (apart from following tutorials, which pretty much all aim for creating a polling app for any reason 😋), I’d like to recap and share that journey by writing this article about that.

I will describe the project, my thoughts and considerations about it and every step which has lead to what the project has become. I will try my best to make this a guide which everybody can follow along if he wants.

Also, I will make this a series, to not end up with an article so long and boring, that even interested readers cannot afford to read it in their spare time.
In this first part of the series, I will explain what this series will be about, mainly.

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Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku – Part 2

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This entry is part 2 of 11 in the series Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku

In the previous part of this series, I introduced the overall idea about what we are trying to achieve and what’s the goal of it.

Today I will show you how to register and prepare your Bot using the Telegram app.

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Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku – Part 3

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This entry is part 3 of 11 in the series Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku

In the previous part of this series, I explained how to register bots on Telegram, how to configure it and how to validate everything is working.

Today I will explain a bit more on how the HTTP API works, how the JSON data provided by the bots ist structured and I will introduce you to telepot, the Python module of my choice for interacting with Telegram bots using Python.

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Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku – Part 4 – pull vs. push method

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This entry is part 4 of 11 in the series Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku

In the previous part of this series, we started to get familiar with telepot, a Python module to interact with Telegram bots and had a short look at how the Telegram bot API is providing messages as JSON structures.

Today we will talk about the Webhook-method (push) instead of the previously introduced getUpdate-method (pull).

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Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku – Part 5 – Introduce Heroku

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This entry is part 5 of 11 in the series Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku

In the previous part of this series, I tried to explain the differences in the two modes a Telegram bot supports: pull (getUpdates) and push (Webhook) methods. I also explained what a webhook is and how to easily giving it a test-drive, without any hassle.

Today we will talk about what Heroku is and about how to prepare your workstation to effectively work with that platform.

If you do not like Heroku or if you simply want to use another hosting service for your bot like AWS, OpenShift, Google Cloud Platform, whatever for any reason: That is perfectly OK and you can do so! I will write this and the next article on Heroku in a way that even when you decide to skip it completely, you won’t miss anything from this Telegram/Python/Django article series but the presentation of how to get the bot hosted on Heroku.
The only thing which you won’t be able to follow 1:1 in the upcoming parts of this series is that you can’t use those commands to trigger new deployments to the hosting platform with or do some minor, hosting platform related steps. But if you are advanced and familiar enough with deploying web applications to have a better idea of hosting an application than me, this shouldn’t be much of a problem for you, since most commands for Heroku are pretty straightforward and easy to adapt for a different system.

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Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku – Part 6 – Creating the Django app

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This entry is part 6 of 11 in the series Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku

 

 

Django_Pony

In the previous part of this series, I tried to give you a brief yet thorough introduction to hosting your projects with Heroku.
That part was special because it was a completely optional part of this series; if you prefer to host your applications on a different platform and skipped that article, I’d like to repeat that this is completely OK and that I had shown nothing you will need for anything different but interacting with Heroku. You will hopefully notice no blank spots in the following articles. There is no need to read that article if you do not plan to use Heroku for hosting your bot. But you should be familiar enough with your hosting solution of choice to adopt the Heroku – commands I show here to an adequate setup for your hosting solution.

Today we will finally start creating our bot with Django. What we did up until now was just some kind of preparation and establishing background. In this part, we will finally start with the real stuff. 💪

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Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku – Part 7 – Introducing apps and URLconf

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This entry is part 7 of 11 in the series Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku

 

Django_Pony

In the previous part of this series, we started with the basics for kicking off a new Django project. We prepared our virtualenv, installed needed modules to it, created and integrated a new Heroku – project for it and learned how to work with variables in Heroku to control our application with an easy example. We also learned how to check our results locally before we publish it to our production space and how we can add an addon to our Heroku project by adding a PostgreSQL database to it.

Today, we will learn what an “app” is in Django and how to create it. Also, we will learn about and create a so-called URLconf / routing to direct specific URLs to specific parts of our code.
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Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku – Part 8 – Integrating the database

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This entry is part 8 of 11 in the series Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku

Django_Pony

In the previous part of this series, we had a bit of a term definition to make it easier for beginners of Django to understand what I am talking about. Also, we created a Django – App called “bot” and created a URL routing for it to be available at (https://dry-tundra-61874.herokuapp.com)/bot/* (or whatever your URL looks like) and how to direct URLs to a view.

Originally, I planned to also show how to start using a database in Django to hold your bot’s data. But since the article grew larger than I anticipated before, I had to cut that down, unfortunately (sorry for that 😰).
Today, I will deliver that part in its own article. We will learn how to work with databases in Django, what migrations are and how to interact with the database from within Django’s Admin-Backend.
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Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku – Part 9 – Creating a model for your messages

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This entry is part 9 of 11 in the series Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku

Django_Pony

In the previous part of this series, I explained what a database is good for in general and Django in special. I also told about what relational database systems (RDBS) are supported by Django, what migrations and models are and how to create and apply them. Further, I introduced and explained what the Django Admin-Backend is and how to use it to create, alter or delete data in tables resulting from having applied the migrations to SQL databases from a model definition.

Today, we will create another database model to hold the message-data forwarded to our webhook by the Telegram – bot in the future. I will try my best to make this a play-along part which invites everyone to follow step by step in another console. Hopefully, it gives you an idea what thoughts and considerations are involved in writing a model for a real-world problem and how to involve Django’s documentation resources.
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Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku – Part 10 – Creating a view for your bot’s webhook

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This entry is part 10 of 11 in the series Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku

Django_Pony

In the previous part of this series, we created another database model named  Message to hold the message-data from our Telegram – bot. I also explained the process of defining a SQL schema using a Django model, what to consider during that phase and how to bring the Django’s model field reference docs to a good use during that process. Last but not least, we learned what a Heroku “One-Off Dyno” is and how it can be used to execute administrative tasks on our production site like applying outstanding migrations to a database.

This time, I will provide you with the last piece of the puzzle to make your bot available to the world. You will learn how to write and wire the Python code to actually use all that we have prepared so far. At the end of this part, your bot will be able to receive and store each message sent to it by registered users. And since it’s already more than a month since I published the previous article in this series, let’s not waste any more time and jump right in!

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