I have created a Telegram bot that works perfectly when I interact with it. The bot responds correctly to all my commands and messages. However, I want to make sure that only I can use this bot and prevent other people from sending messages to it.
Right now anyone who finds my bot can send messages and get responses from it. I need to implement some kind of user restriction or authentication system so that the bot will only respond to my messages and ignore everyone else.
What would be the best approach to achieve this? I’m looking for a way to whitelist specific user IDs or implement some other method to control who can access my bot. Any suggestions on how to set up this kind of access control would be really helpful.
The whitelist works great, but I’d go one step further - create an array of authorized user IDs instead of hardcoding just yours. Makes it easy to add trusted users later without touching the main code. I also send a polite “Sorry, this bot is private” message to unauthorized users instead of ignoring them. Saves confusion if someone stumbles across your bot. Pro tip: store those authorized IDs in environment variables or a config file, not directly in your code. Especially important if you’re sharing or deploying publicly. I’ve used this setup across several private bots - zero security issues so far.
the userid check works well, but handle group chats too in case ur bot ends up there by mistake. i use update.effective_user.id instead of message.from.id - its more reliable across diff update types. log unauthorized attempts too. caught some weird spam that way once.
To restrict your Telegram bot’s usage to just yourself, implement a user ID check in the message handler. When a message is received, use message.from.id to retrieve the sender’s ID and compare it with your own. If the IDs don’t match, the bot should skip processing the command. You can find your user ID through @userinfobot. Make sure to store this ID as a constant in your code and apply this check to every command handler. This approach is reliable since user IDs cannot be impersonated and has proven effective for my personal bots for over a year.