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Intergram

Free live chat widget linked to your Telegram messenger.

Why use a Telegam bot to implement a chat widget?

By using a Telegram bot, I delegate all the message routing work and chat state management to Telegram. I don't have to build fancy mobile and desktop apps for several platforms because Telegram already has a great multiplatform chat client. And, I can easily handle a huge amount of load, because my app runs completely stateless (No database) and just serves as a pipe between Telegram and the chat widget users.

Embed Intergram in your website with these 2 simple steps

  1. Open Telegram messenger, search for @Intergram and hit /start to get your unique chat ID. (direct link)

  1. Paste this code snippet right before the closing body tag of every page where you want the chat to appear (Don't forget to add your actual chat ID).
<script> window.intergramId = <Your unique chat ID> </script>
<script id="intergram" type="text/javascript" src="https://www.intergram.xyz/js/widget.js"></script>

Note: replying to a specific message should be used to respond to that specific visitor. Sending a standard message will broadcast to all connected chat clients (You might find it easier to use if you have only one active conversation)

Footprint

  • Using Preact helped creating a pretty minimal js bundle.
  • The widget injection script is about 5KB gziped and executes only after the host page finished loading ('onload' event).
  • The chat iframe will only be loaded if the user interacts with the chat widget (currently about 40KB gziped).

Important Notice: I plan to keep the hosted chat service 100% free (no ads also!), but there are some hosting expenses (servers, domain, cdn, etc). So while I'm thinking about alternative ways to help me keep it free, I might use it to test new technologies from other projects I work on. If you really care about bandwidth usage and every request performed by this widget please use your own self hosted version.

Deploy your own Intergram instance (Self Hosting)

  1. Talk to Telegram @BotFather, create a new bot and get its API Token.

  2. Deploy this repo to your own chat server.

  • Clone it locally and install or if you use Heroku, fork this repository and point the new app to it.
  • Set an .env variable named TELEGRAM_TOKEN with the value you got from @BotFather

  1. Point the bot webhook to your bot server by making a GET request to the following url https://api.telegram.org/bot<TOKEN>/setWebhook?url=<Server url>/hook (Don't forget to replace with your token and server url)

  2. Open a chat with your bot and hit /start to get your unique chat ID

  3. Embed this code snippet in your website

<script> 
  window.intergramId = <Your unique chat ID>
  window.intergramIFrameSrc = <Server url> + '/chat.html'
</script>
<script id="intergram" type="text/javascript" src="<Server url>/js/widget.js"></script>
  1. 🎉