how to test Telegram bot built with NodeJS?

Question

I made a Telegram bot with NodeJS (node-telegram-bot-api) but right now I am facing an issue is to how to test the bot. I want to test how the bot responds when a message is given to it, how can I simulate that using Node itself and write automated tests based on that. I feel this is not possible but is here anybody which achieved it? I have already tried researching the internet, didn't find anything satisfactory.

Answer 1

Its very simple if you use telegraf library. You will have all built in telegram api capability and its simple to code.

For example: this bot will respond "Hello There" to every text messages sent to the bot.

const { Telegraf } = require("telegraf");

const bot = new Telegraf("YOUR_BOT_TOKEN_HERE");

bot.on("text", async (ctx) => {
  ctx.reply("Hello There");
});

bot.launch();
process.once("SIGINT", () => bot.stop("SIGINT"));
process.once("SIGTERM", () => bot.stop("SIGTERM"));

You can make it smart and intelligent with hooking it up with NLP library.

I created a tutorial on how to create build a smart telegram chatbot with AI/ML capability that using WIT.AI as the NLP engine to help to inteprete message

https://youtu.be/YIeEermeXEU

You can download the source code as well.