Send messages using Telegram and Node-RED

We learned here how to send notification using Pushbullet. In most cases this should be enough but in my case I wanted a little more.

With Telegram and Node-RED you can receive and send messages/photos/videos from and to your automation system.

Get your own Node-RED in the cloud! Free for iotwithus.com users!

In this article I will show you how to send a message from Node-RED to your phone using Telegram, let’s begin:

Open Telegram and search for “BotFather”. Using this bot you can create, delete and manage all your bots.

Start creating your bot using the /newbot command.

You will receive a token that will be used by Node-RED to access Telegram

Click on the menu icon on the top right corner then “Manage Palette”.

Search for “telegrambot” and click Install.

You will now have 5 more nodes in the left palette.

Add a Telegram sender node to your flow and click on it.

Click the pencil icon to add a new bot to your Node-RED

Next we have to enter a “Bot-Name” and a “Token”. You created them in step 1.

All done. Your bot is ready!

We created a bot that could tell you your Telegram ID. Ask it for your ID using /myid command.

Click here to chat with our bot.

First you have to start your bot. Search for it in Telegram and click on Start.

To send a message to Telegram, add an inject node and an function node. You should have something like this:

In the function node we have to create the message. It should contain:

msg.payload = {}
msg.payload.chatId = your-id-here
msg.payload.type = ‘message’
msg.payload.content = ‘hello from node-red!’
return msg;

You can now click on the left of the inject node to send your first message!