Some weeks ago i've written a brief tutorial focused on building a simple Echo BOT on Telegram using Python.

Today i want to share a very small snippet that implements the same Bot using PHP as responder for the Telegram's WebHook.

For Bot registration please refer to my previous article, section "1. Create a Telegram Bot".

When your Telegram Bot has been created, simply create on your webserver this file (named, e.g, webhook.php):

<?php call_user_func(function($hookObj){file_get_contents("https://api.telegram.org/bot<YOURTOKEN>/sendMessage?chat_id=" .$hookObj["message"]["chat"]["id"] . "&text=" . urlencode($hookObj['message']['text']));},json_decode(file_get_contents("php://input"), true)); ?>

Obviously, replace  YOURTOKEN with the token released by BotFather.

The code is pretty simple: the script get the POST data reading php://input (a read-only stream that allows you to read raw data from the request body) and converts it into a JSON object.
The JSON object is passed (using call_user_function) to an anonymous function that reads ChatID and Message and calls (using the file_get_contents function) the Telegram's API in order to send a response to the user.

Finally, connect the Bot with the PHP page, with your browser:

https://api.telegram.org/bot<TOKEN>/setWebhook?url=https://<YOURSERVER>/webhook.php

(for more details, please refers to my article, section "3. Connect the Bot with the Microservice")

That's it!

References