PHP Webhook Handler for Telegram Bot Not Receiving Data

Other Questions Telegram bot
1

I’m having trouble with my Telegram bot webhook setup. The bot works perfectly when I use the getUpdates method, but when I try to set up a webhook endpoint, nothing seems to work.

I’ve configured my webhook URL and my hosting has SSL through Cloudflare. The certificate appears valid since browsers don’t show any warnings.

The main issue is that I can’t capture the incoming POST data from Telegram. I’m trying to log the webhook requests to debug what’s happening, but my log file stays empty.

Here’s my current code:

$input_data = json_decode(file_get_contents('php://input'), true);
file_put_contents('bot_log.txt', var_dump($input_data));

I can’t access server logs on my shared hosting, so I have no way to tell if Telegram is even reaching my endpoint. Has anyone encountered similar issues with webhook setup? What could be preventing the POST data from being captured?

UPDATE: Found the solution! For logging webhook data properly, use this approach:

$raw_input = file_get_contents('php://input');
$file_handle = fopen('webhook_log.txt', 'w');
fwrite($file_handle, $raw_input);
fclose($file_handle);

Also important: when setting the webhook URL, don’t include www in the domain: setwebhook?url=https://yourdomain.com/handler.php

2

glad you figured it out! that www thing got me too when I first set up webhooks. another gotcha - make sure ur webhook script doesn’t echo anything or telegram thinks it’s failing and stops sending updates.

3

Webhook debugging on shared hosting is a pain since you can’t see server logs. I created a simple test endpoint that writes timestamps and incoming headers to a file - at least then you know if requests are hitting your server. Watch out for aggressive PHP file caching too. Some hosts cache everything, so after updating your webhook handler, wait a few minutes or clear the cache. Also, don’t let your script run too long - Telegram expects quick responses. If your processing takes forever, Telegram thinks your webhook is dead and stops sending updates.

4

The var_dump issue in your code was causing problems because it returns null with file_put_contents. I hit this same problem and wasted hours debugging it. Try using error_log() instead of file manipulation when you’re testing - it’s way easier. Also check if your host is blocking HTTP headers. Some shared hosts are really aggressive about filtering webhook requests. You can test if Telegram’s actually hitting your endpoint by just returning a simple HTTP 200 response, then check getWebhookInfo to see if the webhook shows as active.