Send Telegram messages from a Python script

Create a bot with BotFather

Your script needs a bot token before it can message you.

1. Open a chat with @BotFather in Telegram.
2. Send /newbot.
3. Pick a display name, then a username that ends in "bot", like tetris_bot.
4. Copy the token BotFather sends back, which looks like 123456789:AA....

Keep that token secret: it controls the bot.

Find your chat_id

A bot can't start a conversation, so message it first. Then call getUpdates and read message.chat.id: that number is where your script sends alerts.

For alerts in a group, add the bot to the group first. Privacy mode is on by default for bots that are not group admins, so the bot only sees commands meant for it. Send a command like /start@your_bot in the group to create an update.

Two things trip people up:

• getUpdates does not work while an outgoing webhook is set on the bot.
• Telegram keeps undelivered updates for at most 24 hours, so send a fresh message if the result is empty.

import os

import requests

token = os.environ["TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN"]
updates = requests.get(f"https://api.telegram.org/bot{token}/getUpdates", timeout=10).json()

for update in updates["result"]:
    message = update.get("message") or update.get("channel_post") or {}
    chat = message.get("chat")
    if chat:
        print(chat["id"], chat.get("title") or chat.get("first_name"))

Send a message with requests

With the token and chat_id, an alert is one HTTPS POST to https://api.telegram.org/bot<token>/sendMessage with chat_id and text. The text must be 1 to 4,096 characters after entities parsing.

parse_mode accepts HTML or MarkdownV2, and HTML is easier in scripts. MarkdownV2 needs a backslash before _, *, [, ], (, ), ~, ` `, >, #, +, -, =, |, {, }, . and !, which breaks on almost every filename or traceback. With HTML you only escape <, > and &, and html.escape` does that.

import html
import os

import requests

TOKEN = os.environ["TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN"]
CHAT_ID = os.environ["TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID"]


def send(text):
    response = requests.post(
        f"https://api.telegram.org/bot{TOKEN}/sendMessage",
        json={"chat_id": CHAT_ID, "text": text, "parse_mode": "HTML"},
        timeout=10,
    )
    response.raise_for_status()
    return response.json()["result"]["message_id"]


filename = html.escape("db_2026-10-30.sql.gz")
send(f"<b>Backup finished</b>\nFile: <code>{filename}</code>")

Send with python-telegram-bot v22

python-telegram-bot is at version 22.8 (released 2026-06-12) and needs Python 3.10 or newer. It has been asyncio-only since version 20, so you await bot.send_message(...) inside an async function and start it with asyncio.run.

The library is worth it when your script also has to receive commands. For one-way alerts from a job or server, plain requests is enough.

import asyncio
import os

from telegram import Bot


async def main():
    async with Bot(os.environ["TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN"]) as bot:
        await bot.send_message(chat_id=os.environ["TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID"], text="Backup finished")


asyncio.run(main())

Telegram limits for bots

The rate limit depends on whether you message one chat, a group or many users.

When you get a 429, wait the number of seconds in parameters.retry_after and send again:

import time


def send_with_retry(text, attempts=3):
    for _ in range(attempts):
        response = requests.post(
            f"https://api.telegram.org/bot{TOKEN}/sendMessage",
            json={"chat_id": CHAT_ID, "text": text},
            timeout=10,
        )
        if response.status_code != 429:
            response.raise_for_status()
            return response.json()["result"]["message_id"]
        time.sleep(response.json()["parameters"]["retry_after"])
    response.raise_for_status()

Progress bars and run links in Telegram

To watch a loop without a new message per step, tqdm ships tqdm.contrib.telegram. Pass token and chat_id to tqdm(iterable, token=..., chat_id=...), or set TQDM_TELEGRAM_TOKEN and TQDM_TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID, and it posts one message and keeps editing it as the bar moves.