How to create telegram bots in Ruby

Source: Dev.to

You must have heard of or used Telegram bots.
Now the deep question is: how are they created? We’re going to see that—get your IDE ready because we’re going to create a bot in 5 minutes.

Requirements

• A good IDE with Ruby installed
• Basic or advanced knowledge of Ruby
• Bot token from @BotFather

If you don’t know how to get your bot token, check out this post 👉 How to get your Telegram token.

Setup

1. Create a Gemfile

source 'https://rubygems.org'

gem 'telegem', '~> 3.0.4'
gem 'dotenv', '~> 2.8'

# add any other gems you wish (httparty, nethttp, json, etc.)

2. Install dependencies

If you’re using Bundler:

bundle install

Or install the gems manually:

gem install telegem dotenv

3. Add your bot token

Create a .env file in the project root:

BOT_TOKEN=11234:445849489449   # replace with your actual token

Creating the Bot

Create a file named bot.rb:

# bot.rb
require 'telegem'
require 'dotenv/load'

bot = Telegem.new(ENV['BOT_TOKEN'])

bot.command('start') do |ctx|
  ctx.reply('welcome to test2bot')
end

bot.command('help') do |ctx|
  ctx.reply('**u need help**', parse_mode: 'Markdown')
end

bot.start_polling
puts 'bot has started'

Running the Bot

bundle exec ruby bot.rb

Your bot will now respond to the /start and /help commands.

Further Resources

For a more in‑depth tutorial and additional examples, see the official repository: 👉 Telegem examples.