Telegraf

Telegraf is an open-source Node.js framework for building Telegram bots. It provides a concise, middleware-based API that wraps the Telegram Bot API, enabling developers to handle messages, commands, inline queries, and other Telegram features with modular handlers. The project is maintained by the open-source community and released under the MIT license. It is published on npm and widely used in the Node.js ecosystem.

Telegraf uses a layered middleware pattern similar to Express or Koa, allowing multiple handlers to be composed for a given update. Core features include command handling (bot.command), text matching (bot.hears), and event handling (bot.on for various update types), as well as support for inline queries, callback queries, and reply markup for keyboards. It also provides session management and scene-based flows for multi-step conversations, via plugins that manage state. The library supports both long polling and webhook deployment, enabling operation in a variety of hosting environments. TypeScript typings are available, and a growing ecosystem of plugins extends functionality with authentication, persistence, analytics, and integrations.

Usage and ecosystem: To use Telegraf, developers obtain a bot token from BotFather and create a Telegraf instance with that token. They register handlers using a fluent API and launch the bot with a single command. Telegraf integrates with popular hosting platforms and can be extended with community plugins for databases, persistence, and analytics. It remains a popular choice for developers seeking a lightweight, flexible interface to the Telegram Bot API.

History and reception: Since its introduction, Telegraf has become one of the more widely used Node.js frameworks for Telegram bots, noted for its simplicity, modularity, and active community.