I’m working on a Telegram bot and need to set up user verification. Think of it like how websites have login systems to protect certain content from unauthorized users.
My Current Understanding
I found some info about using deep linking for this purpose. The process seems to involve:
Setting up a bot (let’s call it @MyAuthBot)
Creating a webhook to handle incoming messages
Generating unique tokens like auth_token = "xY9mK2pQrTvB8nE5wL7zMA"
Storing verification data temporarily (maybe in Redis for 1 hour)
Creating special links like t.me/MyAuthBot?start=xY9mK2pQrTvB8nE5wL7zMA
Processing /start commands to match tokens with user IDs
Saving the chat_id for future messaging
What I Need Help With
I understand the basic webhook concept - Telegram servers send updates to my server via HTTP requests. But I’m confused about the actual implementation.
How exactly does the token verification work? When a user clicks the special link, how do I connect their Telegram account to my system?
Any code examples or clearer explanations would be really helpful. I’m particularly struggling with steps 3-6 of the authentication flow.
Think of it as a handshake between two systems. Your web app creates a token and stores it with whatever context you need - user ID, permissions, expiry time. User clicks the deep link, Telegram sends them to your bot with that token in the start command. Your webhook gets this and looks up what the token means in your database. Make sure tokens are cryptographically secure and single-use. Use UUID4 or something similar, not sequential numbers. Don’t forget cleanup jobs for expired tokens when users abandon the flow. One gotcha I hit: users clicking the link multiple times before your system processes the first request. You’ll need proper locking to avoid race conditions.
debugging was the biggest pain point for me. log everything - token creation, /start commands, chat_ids, all of it. test with multiple users too since it might work fine alone but break under concurrent load. also, watch out for telegram’s rate limits if you’re doing bulk verification - batch those api calls.
I built something like this last year and got confused at first too. The token verification is pretty simple once you get the flow. When someone clicks your deep link, Telegram automatically sends /start xY9mK2pQrTvB8nE5wL7zMA to your bot. Your webhook gets this with the user’s chat_id and token as a parameter. Then you just query your temp storage (Redis works great) using that token as the key. If it exists and hasn’t expired, you know it’s legit. Now you can link the chat_id to whatever user account or session started the verification. The thing I missed at first - the token is basically a bridge between your web app and the Telegram chat. Don’t forget to delete the token after using it or you’ll get replay attacks. Also throw some rate limiting on token generation so people can’t abuse it.