This short guide will walk you through hosting your very own telegram bot on Ubuntu (tested on Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04)!
This guide assumes knowledge of the following:
1) Provisioning a VPS
2) Familiarity with SSH
3) Familiarity with linux command line
To begin, you will need to provision a VPS from cloud providers such as digitalocean or upcloud. Other popular services like AWS and google cloud would work as well with their EC2 and compute instances but the nature of those services are such that they are slightly more complicated to work with so they will not be included in this guide.
Once you have your VPS provisioned, SSH into your server with the following command (replacing 11.11.11.11 with your server's IP address):
$ ssh root@11.11.11.11
Within your server, run the update command below:
$ apt-get update
Next, to ensure that your bot will be running 24/7, we will be using screen to keep the process alive even when we are no longer maintaining an SSH connection to the server:
$ apt-get install screen
Let us next quickly create a new user that will be handling this telegram bot. For the purpose of this guide, a telegram bot I coded in python, Simple Media Converter will be used which will be handled by the user smc. Run the following command to create this new user:
$ adduser smc
Give the user superuser permissions:
$ usermod -aG sudo smc
For the remaining part of the guide, exit from your root SSH session and login as smc instead (again replacing 11.11.11.11 with the IP address of your VPS):
$ ssh smc@11.11.11.11
This part will vary greatly depending on the nature of your project. For demonstration purposes, if you are following through with the Simple Media Converter project, then follow this setup guide to get the project ready.
Once the project setup is complete, initialize a new screen session with the following command (this is important if you want your bot to be running 24/7):
$ screen
Hit enter to continue and in this new screen, start your telegram bot:
$ python3 main.py
Detach from the screen by hitting ctrl + a + d on your keyboard. Make sure to hit all 3 at once because just hitting ctrl + d alone will terminate your screen instead. To view the list of screens, you may use the following command:
$ screen -ls
To reattach to the screen, simply use the command:
$ screen -r
With that, your bot should now be running 24/7! This concludes the guide for hosting your very own telegram bot on Ubuntu! Thank you for reading!