Azure serverless Telegram bot

Deploy and run your Telegram bot on Azure-based serverless architecture. This simple platform will handle bot requests /start and /stop to register Telegram conversation in a Storage Account blob so that it can be used to send messages to chats.

How to start

1. (Optional) Get a custom domain. Freenom is a good starting point to obtain a domain for free.
2. Deploy infrastructure on Azure: edit the file .cicd/parameters/dev.json, then run a deployment on ARM. You can use Azure CLI or Az Powershell. You will now have a resource group with a Key Vault, a Storage Account, an Azure Function and some other resources.
3. Follow the instructions to create a new Telegram bot and retrieve the bot token.
4. Edit the Azure Function configuration and add an entry cfg-secret-telegram-bot-token with the token, or create a secret in the Key Vault called telegram-bot-token.
5. Set up the bot to use webhooks on the bot endpoint, you can use the script setup.py after editing it. If you don't want to use a certificate, comment out that part.
6. Deploy the Azure Function.

Run locally

To run locally create a file local.settings.json in the bot folder. Set it up in this way:

{
  "IsEncrypted": false,
  "Values": {
    "AzureWebJobsStorage": "{CONNECTION_STRING_TO_STORAGE_ACCOUNT}",
    "FUNCTIONS_WORKER_RUNTIME": "python",
    "AzureWebJobs.BotEndpoint.Disabled": "false",
    "cfg-config-core-mainkeyvault": "az-serverless-bot",
    "cfg-config-core-mainstorage": "az-serverless-bot",
    "cfg-secret-telegram-bot-token": "{TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN}"
  }
}

Run the Azure Function and use ngrok to obtain a temporary public endpoint that exposes the local endpoint. Update the Telegram bot to send updates accordingly.