Telegram

1. What you get with Telegram
2. How the integration works
3. Good to know

Telegram is the fastest way to get an alert onto every device you own — phone, desktop, watch — with delivery that borders on instant and apps for every platform. For solo developers and small teams especially, it beats email and rivals anything heavier. Wire up a Telegram bot and Rocketeers pushes deploy, build and status notifications straight into your chat.

#What you get with Telegram

• Deploy, build, uptime and incident alerts delivered as instant messages.
• Notifications in a private chat, a team group or a channel — your choice.
• Works everywhere Telegram does: mobile, desktop, web, tablet.
• Free forever — Telegram bots cost nothing to create or run.
• No email lag, no app switching: alerts arrive where you already look.

#How the integration works

Message @BotFather on Telegram to create a bot — it takes under a minute and gives you a bot token. Add the bot to the group or channel that should receive alerts (or just start a direct chat with it), find the chat ID, and enter both token and chat ID in Rocketeers. From then on, Rocketeers sends notifications through the Telegram Bot API to that chat: deployments, build results, downtime and recovery.

#Good to know

• Bots can't message you first — send your bot a message (or add it to the group) before expecting alerts, or Telegram will reject the delivery.
• Group chat IDs are negative numbers; that's normal, not a mistake.
• The Bot API is free with generous limits — around 20 messages per minute to the same group — which deploy alerts won't trouble.
• If you upgrade a group to a supergroup, the chat ID changes; update it in Rocketeers if alerts suddenly stop.