Telegram bot in Go: from idea to deployment in 30 minutes

Why Go is the ideal language for Telegram bots

If you've ever written bots in Python, you know: everything works until you hit a performance bottleneck. Go solves this problem at the architecture level. It's fast, lightweight, and doesn't require a virtual environment. A Telegram bot in Go is not just a toy, but a full-fledged service that can handle thousands of requests per second and consumes minimal memory.

In this article, we will create a bot in Golang from scratch that will respond to commands, process messages, and even work with an external API. No unnecessary theory — just code you can run immediately.

Step 1: Environment setup

Before writing a Telegram bot in Go, make sure you have Go version 1.20 or higher installed. You can check with the command:

go version

If Go is not installed, download it from the official website. Installation takes 2 minutes.

You will also need a bot token. Go to Telegram, find BotFather and run the command:

/newbot

Enter the bot's name and username. After creation, BotFather will send you a token — save it, you'll need it to connect to the Telegram Bot API.

Step 2: Project structure

Create a project folder and initialize the module:

mkdir my-telegram-botcd my-telegram-botgo mod init my-telegram-bot

To work with Telegram, we will use the tgbotapi library — this is the most popular Go library for Telegram. Install it:

go get github.com/go-telegram-bot-api/telegram-bot-api/v5

Now create the main.go file. The basic structure will be like this:

package main

import (    "log"    "os"    tgbotapi "github.com/go-telegram-bot-api/telegram-bot-api/v5")

func main() {    token := os.Getenv("TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN")    bot, err := tgbotapi.NewBotAPI(token)    if err != nil {        log.Panic(err)    }

    bot.Debug = true    log.Printf("Bot @%s started", bot.Self.UserName)

    u := tgbotapi.NewUpdate(0)    u.Timeout = 60

    updates := bot.GetUpdatesChan(u)

    for update := range updates {        if update.Message != nil {            log.Printf("[%s] %s", update.Message.From.UserName, update.Message.Text)            msg := tgbotapi.NewMessage(update.Message.Chat.ID, "Hello! I'm working on Go!")            bot.Send(msg)        }    }}

Run the bot:

export TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN="your_token"go run main.go

Write to the bot in Telegram — it should reply. If everything works, move on to the next step.

Step 3: Command handling

Just replying "Hello" is boring. Let's add command handling for the Telegram bot. Let's implement the /start and /help commands:

for update := range updates {    if update.Message != nil {        switch update.Message.Command() {        case "start":            msg := tgbotapi.NewMessage(update.Message.Chat.ID, "Welcome! I'm a bot in Go. Use /help for a list of commands.")            bot.Send(msg)        case "help":            msg := tgbotapi.NewMessage(update.Message.Chat.ID, "Available commands:/start - greeting/help - help/echo - repeat message")            bot.Send(msg)        default:            msg := tgbotapi.NewMessage(update.Message.Chat.ID, "Unknown command. Use /help")            bot.Send(msg)        }    }}

Now the bot responds to commands. But this is just the beginning. The real power of a Golang Telegram bot lies in its performance when handling large loads.

Step 4: Working with an external API

Let's add a useful function