Creating a Chat Bot in PHP: From Theory to Working Code

Why PHP is an Excellent Language for a Chat Bot?

When it comes to creating chat bots, many immediately think of Python or Node.js. But PHP, which powers pythonlib.ru and most of the internet, handles this task just as well. PHP has three main advantages: ease of deployment on any hosting, a huge number of ready-made libraries, and clear syntax. If you are already familiar with PHP, you can write your first chat bot in an evening. In this article, we will break down creating a chat bot in PHP from scratch, starting from registration in Telegram to processing complex commands.

We will not use frameworks — only pure PHP and one official library. This will allow you to understand how everything works "under the hood." And then you can easily move on to any modern framework (Laravel, Symfony) for scaling.

What Do You Need to Get Started?

Before writing code, let's prepare the working environment. For bot development in PHP you will need:

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• Web server (Apache or Nginx) with PHP 7.4 or higher — any hosting or OpenServer on a local machine will do.
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• HTTPS access — Telegram requires a secure connection for Webhook (you can use ngrok for local development).
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• Composer — a package manager for PHP (install with one command).
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• Telegram account — for registering the bot and testing.
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If you already have a PHP website, like pythonlib.ru, you can add the bot directly to its subdomain — this is convenient and requires no additional costs.

Registering the Bot in Telegram

Open Telegram, find BotFather (the official bot for creating bots) and send the command:

/newbot

BotFather will ask you to come up with a name and username for your bot. The username must end with bot, for example: MyFirstPHPBot. After successful registration, you will receive a token — a long string like:

1234567890:AAHdqTcvCH1vGWJxfSeofSAs0K5PALDsaw

Save this token — it will be needed for all API requests. Do not share it with anyone, otherwise your bot could be hacked.

Chat Bot Architecture: Long Polling vs Webhook

There are two ways to make the bot receive messages:

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• Long Polling — the bot itself constantly "pings" the Telegram server asking: "Any new messages?". Easier for debugging, but loads the server.
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• Webhook — Telegram itself sends a POST request to your URL when someone writes to the bot. Faster and more reliable, requires HTTPS.
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In this practical guide we will use Webhook, as it is the modern standard for production bots. You can set it up with one command via the browser.

Step 1: Install the Library for Working with the Telegram API

To avoid writing JSON parsing and sending requests manually, let's install the official PHP library from Telegram. Open the terminal in your project folder and run:

composer require telegram-bot/api

This library supports all API methods and is updated along with Telegram. After installation, the vendor folder and composer.json file will appear.

Step 2: Basic Script for Processing Incoming Messages

Create a file bot.php — this will be the entry point for the Webhook. Here is minimal code that replies "Hello!" to any message:

<?php\nrequire_once __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';\n\nuse Telegram\\Bot\\Api;\n\n$token = 'YOUR_TOKEN_HERE';\n$telegram = new Api($token);\n\n// Get the incoming update\n$update = $telegram->getWebhookUpdate();\n\n// Extract the message text and chat ID\n$message = $update->getMessage();\n$chatId