Documentation

Connect a local Rasa chatbot to Telegram with Pinggy

Rasa is an open-source framework for building intent-driven chatbots. After training a model, Rasa runs an HTTP server that other chat platforms can deliver messages to. Telegram, like most chat platforms, sends every incoming message to a webhook URL - and that URL has to be publicly reachable over HTTPS.

Pinggy puts the public HTTPS endpoint in front of your local Rasa server, so you can develop and iterate on the bot without deploying it.

Step 1: Train and start Rasa

From the directory containing your domain.yml and training data:

rasa train
rasa run --enable-api -p 5005

The Rasa server now listens on http://localhost:5005. Confirm it answers:

curl http://localhost:5005/

Step 2: Configure the Telegram channel in credentials.yml

Rasa ships with a built-in Telegram connector. Add the following block to credentials.yml, leaving webhook_url as a placeholder for now:

telegram:
  access_token: "<bot-token-from-BotFather>"
  verify: "<bot-username>"
  webhook_url: "https://placeholder.invalid/webhooks/telegram/webhook"

Get the bot token by messaging @BotFather on Telegram and creating a new bot.

Step 3: Tunnel the Rasa port

Open the tunnel:

ssh -p 443 -R0:localhost:5005 free.pinggy.io

Note the HTTPS URL Pinggy returns - for example https://abcd1234.a.pinggy.link. Update credentials.yml so webhook_url points to <pinggy-url>/webhooks/telegram/webhook, then restart Rasa so the new value takes effect.

Step 4: Register the webhook with Telegram

Telegram needs to know where to deliver messages. Either let Rasa register it automatically on startup (recent versions do this when the channel is configured), or call the Bot API directly:

curl -X POST \
  "https://api.telegram.org/bot<BOT_TOKEN>/setWebhook" \
  --data-urlencode "url=https://abcd1234.a.pinggy.link/webhooks/telegram/webhook"

A successful response is {"ok":true,"result":true,"description":"Webhook was set"}.

Step 5: Send a test message

Open Telegram, find your bot by username, and send any message. The Rasa server logs should show an incoming POST to /webhooks/telegram/webhook, and Rasa replies through the same webhook.

For long-running development sessions, use a persistent subdomain so the webhook URL does not change between Pinggy reconnects - otherwise the Telegram registration has to be redone every time.