Telegram
Telegram
Section titled “Telegram”Send messages, photos and documents to a Telegram chat via the Bot API — the best “notify me on my phone” sink without building push infrastructure.
What it does
Section titled “What it does”Posts to a Telegram chat: a text message, a photo (with caption), or a document (with caption). Formatting can be plain, Markdown, MarkdownV2, or HTML. Every scheduled watcher can suddenly reach you wherever you are — pairs directly with Element Change Trigger and Digest, and sending a photo makes Screenshot Page genuinely useful (“this page changed, here’s what it looks like now”).
This node is send-only. Receiving updates (
getUpdatespolling) needs a long-running process and is out of scope.
Resource and operations
Section titled “Resource and operations”| Resource | Operations |
|---|---|
| Message | Send message, Send photo, Send document |
Inputs and settings
Section titled “Inputs and settings”| Setting | Notes |
|---|---|
| Credential | The Telegram bot token (see below). |
| Operation | Send message, photo, or document. |
| Chat ID | The target chat: a numeric chat ID, or a channel username like @mychannel. |
| Text | The message text (Send message). |
| Photo / Document | An HTTP URL, a Telegram file_id, or a base64 data: URL (e.g. from Screenshot Page — it is uploaded to Telegram as a file). |
| Caption | Optional caption under a photo/document. |
| Formatting | None, Markdown, MarkdownV2, or HTML — applied to the text/caption. |
Getting a bot token
Section titled “Getting a bot token”- In Telegram, open a chat with @BotFather and send
/newbot. - Follow the prompts; BotFather gives you a token like
123456:ABC-DEF.... - Start a chat with your new bot (or add it to a group/channel) so it can message you, and note the chat ID.
Dependencies and credentials
Section titled “Dependencies and credentials”- Auth type: Bearer Token — store the bot token.
- The bot token is the whole credential and grants full control of the bot — treat it like a password. It is stored in your credential vault and resolved at run time (never read from a node parameter); the node places it in the request path (
/bot<token>/sendMessage), not a header.
Web and extension builds
Section titled “Web and extension builds”The Telegram Bot API sends CORS headers, so this node works in both the web app and the browser extension.
Troubleshooting
Section titled “Troubleshooting”Unauthorized— the bot token is wrong or revoked; recreate it with @BotFather.chat not found— the Chat ID is wrong, or the bot has never been started/added to that chat. Message the bot first (or add it to the group/channel).Bad Request: can't parse entities— the text doesn’t match the selected Formatting; switch Formatting to None or fix the markup.