How to Deploy a Telegram Bot using Heroku for

FREE
A Complete Guide Using the python-telegram-bot Library

Haohui May 4, 2020 · 6 min read

R unning your telegram bot locally suffices for simple applications. However, if you wanted to
scale up your bot and enable others to use your bot even when you are not running the bot
locally, you will need to go one step further to deploy the bot.

Photo by Ian Battaglia on Unsplash

In this tutorial, I will be going through how to deploy a telegram bot you have created using
the python-telegram-bot library with Heroku. What’s even better is that we can do this completely
for free! Forget about all the fees you incur from other hosting options, Heroku will mostly likely
suffice for your needs, without you having to pay a single cent nor enter your credit card details.

In order to do so, I will use a simple starter script taken from the examples in the python-telegram-
bot Github repository where the bot simply echos whatever the user sends. You may have a
different script, but I will show you which sections to modify in order to deploy the bot using
Heroku.

If you want to go straight to the files needed, head over to this Github repository to download
them!

This is our starting point:

Modifying the python-telegram-bot script
Changing from Polling to Webhooks
Firstly, we will modify how the bot fetches new data. The python-telegram-bot script uses polling
instead of webhooks to fetch new data. For simple testing purposes, polling is sufficient because
it’s simple to implement. However, the disadvantage of polling is that it is inefficient and the data it
fetches is always old and never real-time. This is because polling sends a request at a
predetermined frequency to detect any changes in the data, meaning it constantly checks if the
data is modified, instead of being “notified” when a change is made to the data.
 Image taken from https://community.stuart.engineering/t/webhooks-vs-polling/257

On the other hand, webhooks act like push notifications. Rather than fetching information,
webhooks are triggered when the data is modified. This allows for realtime information and also
makes it much more efficient because there is no need to continuously send requests to check for
data.

Image taken from https://community.stuart.engineering/t/webhooks-vs-polling/257

We first import os, and then set the port number to listen in for the webhook.

import os

PORT = int(os.environ.get('PORT', 5000))

Next, we modify the following line from

updater.start_polling()

to
 updater.start_webhook(listen="0.0.0.0",

port=int(PORT),
url_path=TOKEN)

updater.bot.setWebhook('https://yourherokuappname.herokuapp.com/' + TOKEN)

What this is doing is that it changes the polling method to webhook, listening in to 0.0.0.0 with
the port you specified above with the PORT variable. The token refers to the API token of your
telegram bot, which should be defined at the top of the code. The next line is to set the Webhook
with the link to your heroku app, which we will get to next.

With all the changes to the python file, it should look similar to this (with your own Telegram bot
token):
Creating your Heroku Webapp — Setting up the Directory
We are done with editing the python-telegram-bot script, except for changing the name of your
heroku app which we will get into soon. In order for heroku to recognise the following as a python
app, you need the following files in the same directory:

bot.py

Procfile

requirements.txt
The python code should be inside the bot.py file, and I will go through the process to create the
Procfile and requirements.txt.

First, change the directory of your terminal / command prompt to the same directory containing
your python script. Then, create a requirements.txt file containing the following line:

python-telegram-bot==12.7

This is needed to tell heroku which libraries it needs to install in order to execute the code.
Assuming you are using the sample code above, the only library you need is python-telegram-bot,
and the version we are using is 12.7. If you are importing other libraries to run your python code,
be sure to include the other libraries as well in the requirements.txt file.

Next, you need a Procfile. The procfile declares the process type followed by the command, in the
format <process type>: <command>. Here, we are using the web process type, which receives
external HTTP traffic from Heroku’s routers. The command is python3 bot.py, which tells Heroku
to execute the python file as you normally would with a python file locally. So your Procfile should
contain the line:

web: python3 bot.py

Make sure that the Procfile does not have any file extension like .txt behind it, because it won’t
work.

Creating your Heroku Webapp

With the three files in the same directory, we will now create the Heroku Webapp.

1. Login / create a Heroku account.

2. Install the Heroku CLI. If you do not have Git installed, first install Git before proceeding with
the Heroku CLI.

3. Once installed, you can use the heroku command in your terminal / command prompt. Go to
the same directory as your python files, and type:

heroku login

A new window will be opened in your browser prompting you to login, so just click on the button.
4. Once you are logged in, go back to the command line. Type in

heroku create

to create your new webapp. Here, heroku will assign your webapp a name as well as the link to
your webapp, which should be of the format https://yourherokuappname.herokuapp.com/. Paste
the URL into the bot.py code, for the line

updater.bot.setWebhook('https://yourherokuappname.herokuapp.com/' + TOKEN)

With all the changes to your bot.py file, it should look similar to this (with your own Telegram bot
token and heroku app name, of course):
5. Next, in your command line, type in

git init
git add
.
git commit
-m "first commit"

heroku git:remote -a YourAppName

git push heroku master

The first line creates a new Git repository. The second line then tells Git that you want to include
updates to a particular file in the next commit. The third line then commits the changes. In the
fourth line, change “YourAppName” to the name of your heroku app. Lastly, the fifth line pushes
everything to the server.

You should then see the following messages:

In particular, it will say that a Python app is detected and it will install the required libraries in the
requirements.txt file using pip. Then, it will read the Procfile which specifies that the bot.py file is
to be executed.
So that’s it! Once it finishes executing, you can simply head over to Telegram and message /start to
your bot. It should now behave as you expect it to.

Since you are using the free plan on heroku, the bot will sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity. So do
expect the bot to take a few seconds to respond to your /start if you are using it more than 30
minutes after it was previously used. Other than that, the bot will respond almost
instantaneously~

What to do if your Bot stops responding

I’ve noticed that the bot stops responding after about 24 hours of inactivity (because we are using
the free version of Heroku), so if you want to “jolt” the bot awake, one way is to make a change to
one of the files (eg. changing the python3 in the procfile to python and vice versa) and then
committing the changes with the lines below:

git add .
git commit
-m "changing python3 to python in Procfile"
git push heroku master

You should see again see the messages about a Python app being detected and once it finishes
executing, your bot should revive now!