Setting Up a Telegram Userbot
Why do I need one?
A Telegram userbot helps you manage groups, sticker packs, your inbox; do quick
web searches, download music, mirror files to your Google Drive, and hundreds
of other commands. It’s not an actual bot that has its own username like Miss
Rose bot. Userbots run as a session of your own account, it responds to
commands you give out, as you. For example, if I send .currency 100 inr usd
in any group/PM, the userbot will detect it, convert the currency from INR to
USD, and will edit that message to give you the output in that message itself.
Is it safe to use one?
The short answer is yes. The long answer is that it depends on your usage of
the bot. There are certain commands that you must use with extreme caution,
such as .term
, .exec
and .eval
. These commands allow you to run snippets
of code from the userbot’s host. There is some basic protection applied to
these commands but you’ll have to check the code and make sure it’s safe before
using it. There are a few commands that spam Telegram’s servers such as
.spam
, .scam
and anything else that sends out messages/edit in rapid
succession. The bot or its devs are not responsible for your misuse of these
commands, use them at your own discretion.
Where do I host it?
The easiest way to host the userbot is on Heroku. They give you 500 hours per month for free. If you add your billing info (no need to pay anything, just giving them your address and credit card numbers), they give you an additional 500 hours for free.
Which bot do I use?
I maintain a userbot called KensurBot, which has a few exclusive modules that I wrote, and is overall sane. As of writing, it supports 210 commands. I keep it up-to-date and I fix bugs relatively fast. You can use other userbots too, the procedure is mostly the same but I’ll use my bot for this guide.
What do I need?
First of all you’ll need Telegram’s API. To get your own API ID and API Hash, do this:
- Log in to your Telegram core: https://my.telegram.org. Depending on your country, you might need a VPN.
- Go to ‘API development tools’ and fill out the form for creating an app (you can fill in anything, it doesn’t matter).
- You will get basic addresses as well as the
api_id
andapi_hash
parameters required for user authorization.
Next up, you’ll need to generate a session string. This will allow your bot to login as you. Think of it as a separate device that’s logged in to your account. I’ve simplified this process, do this:
- Go to http://sessiongen.kenhv.repl.run
and click on
Run
at the top. - Enter the
API_ID
andAPI_HASH
that you got from the previous steps. - Enter your phone number with country code (for eg, +919876543210) and follow the instructions.
- Check the Saved Messages section in your Telegram, your session string will be sent there.
- This value is your
SESSION_STRING
.
Do NOT share this session string anywhere, as this is essentially a key that allows someone (or in our case, the userbot) to log in to your account.
That’s pretty much everything you need for getting the userbot up and running, there are other stuff that you might want in the future such as GDrive management, LastFM integration, and these will need their own credentials and API keys but that’s out of the scope of this guide.
You’ll need to make a separate group in your Telegram for the userbot to store its logs and other info.
- Go to Telegram and create a group.
- Add
@MissRose_bot
to your group. - Send
/id
in the group, Rose will give you the Chat ID of your group. - The Chat ID will have a
-
sign at the start, don’t leave out the-
sign. - This value is your
BOTLOG_CHATID
.
Make a Heroku account, add in your billing info if you want the additional 500 hours of uptime. Google will help you with this part. Head to https://dashboard.heroku.com/account and get your API key.
How do I deploy the bot in Heroku?
Now that the hard part is done, the rest is pretty straightforward.
- Head to KensurBot’s GitHub repo and click on Deploy to Heroku under the Setting Up section. Or just click here. This will take you to Heroku’s deploy page.
- Fill in the app name, you can put anything you want here. As for the region, choose whichever one is closest to your physical location.
- Fill in the
API_KEY
(API_ID),API_HASH
,SESSION_STRING
,BOTLOG_CHATID
andHEROKU_API_KEY
you got from the previous section. - Copy the name of your app that you entered at the start to
HEROKU_APP_NAME
as it is. - Set
ALIVE_NAME
to the name you want the userbot to display when you send.alive
(don’t worry you can change this all later at any time). - Read through the rest of the config options and add/change them if you need (like the above step you can change these at any time).
- Leave the logging options as they are (KensurBot has logging enabled by default).
- Click on Deploy App at the bottom of the page.
- If all goes well, you should see Your app was successfully deployed.
- Click on the Manage App button.
- Go to Resources tab, and make sure the worker is on. If not, click on the pencil icon and turn it on and click Confirm.
- Click on the More button (above the tabs, and right next to Open App button), and select View logs.
- If all went well, you should see something like this at the bottom:
Congratulations, the bot is up and running! Send .help in any chat for more info.
- Like it says, send
.help
in any chat for info on how to use the commands.
Updates
Send .update
and the bot will check for updates. If there are any, you can
send .update deploy
and the bot will update itself.
Support group
In case you face errors during deploying the bot, face any crashes, have questions, or just want to hang out in a dumb off-topic group, head to my Telegram group. Check out my Telegram channel, I post all my projects there and share some stuff/resources.
Peace out!