Telegram Alerter

Use this skill when a Python script needs to push a Telegram notification without hardcoding credentials. It provides a dependency-light pattern for message/photo dispatch, inline buttons, and rate-limit retry handling.

When to invoke

• User says: "send a telegram alert" / "notify telegram" / "telegram bot send"
• Code in the conversation uses: Python scripts that need job completion, failure, or digest notifications.

When NOT to invoke

• The user wants Slack, Discord, email, or webhooks instead of Telegram.
• The user wants a full bot conversation framework with commands, state, and long polling.

Concrete example

User input:

Add a Telegram alert when my nightly scraper finishes and link to the dashboard.

Output:

# Copy assets/send_alert.py into your project, then:
from send_alert import send_telegram

ok = send_telegram(
    "Job done: processed 42 items in 18 minutes.",
    button=("Open dashboard", "https://example.com/dash"),
)
if not ok:
    print("Telegram delivery failed after retries")

The helper reads TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN and TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID from the environment. User-provided text should be HTML-escaped before formatting.

Pattern to apply

1. Keep bot token and chat id in environment variables only.
2. Build a sendMessage payload by default and switch to sendPhoto when a photo URL is provided.
3. Use Telegram HTML formatting, but escape untrusted content.
4. Add inline keyboard JSON when a button label and URL are supplied.
5. Retry transient failures and honor retry_after on HTTP 429.

Reference: assets/send_alert.py.

Source

Distilled from production use across the author's automation projects. v0.1.0. See also: [[pr-body-formatter]].