Make a Compliment Telegram Bot in Golang

The purpose of this guide is to make a simple telegram bot, which replies with a compliment for each and every message that it receives.

Create a bot in telegram

• Look for a bot named BotFather t.me/botfather . This bot is used to create bots in telegram.
• There enter /newbot
• Enter a unique name for your bot, ex - complimentrbot
• Then you will get a message with the bot link and bot token to access the bot.

Telegram Echo Bot

Get the basic example of telegram echo bot from here

In the example, change the MyAwesomeBotToken to the actual bot token which we got in the above step.

Use the Complimentr api to get the compliments

complimentr.com/api (check this link to see the API response).

Now, we write a function in our main.go called getCompliment().

func getCompliment() (string, error) {
        // make a get call to the api endpoint
    resp, err := http.Get("https://complimentr.com/api")
    if err != nil {
        return "", err
    }

    defer resp.Body.Close()

    // read the body in bytes
        body, err := ioutil.ReadAll(resp.Body)
    if err != nil {
        return "", err
    }

    m := make(map[string]string)

        // convert json data into a map
    err = json.Unmarshal(body, &m)
    if err != nil {
        return "", err
    }

        // return the compliment string
    return m["compliment"], nil
}

Now, we can modify the echo bot to reply with a compliment.

c, err := getCompliment()
    if err!=nil{
      fmt.Println("Error while getting compliment")
      continue
    }

msg := tgbotapi.NewMessage(update.Message.Chat.ID, c)

Final Code

package main

import (
    "encoding/json"
    "io/ioutil"
    "fmt"
        "os"
  "log"
    "net/http"
  "github.com/go-telegram-bot-api/telegram-bot-api"
)

func getCompliment() (string, error) {
    resp, err := http.Get("https://complimentr.com/api")
    if err != nil {
        return "", err
    }

    defer resp.Body.Close()

    body, err := ioutil.ReadAll(resp.Body)
    if err != nil {
        return "", err
    }

    m := make(map[string]string)

    err = json.Unmarshal(body, &m)
    if err != nil {
        return "", err
    }

    return m["compliment"], nil
}

func main() {

  token := os.Getenv("TELEGRAM_TOKEN")

  bot, err := tgbotapi.NewBotAPI(token)
    if err != nil {
        log.Panic(err)
    }

    bot.Debug = true

    log.Printf("Authorized on account %s", bot.Self.UserName)

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

    updates, err := bot.GetUpdatesChan(u)

    for update := range updates {
        if update.Message == nil { // ignore any non-Message Updates
            continue
        }

        log.Printf("[%s] %s", update.Message.From.UserName, update.Message.Text)

    c, err := getCompliment()
    if err!=nil{
      fmt.Println("Error while getting compliment")
      continue
    }

        msg := tgbotapi.NewMessage(update.Message.Chat.ID, c)
        msg.ReplyToMessageID = update.Message.MessageID

        bot.Send(msg)
    }
}