Telegram Chat Bot Emulator

Howdy is an easy-to-use Telegram emulator for developing chat bots on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It doesn’t require any certificates, public servers, or real Telegram clients.

Just use your web browser to test and debug chat bots while developing new cool features.

Demo

Click on the image below to watch a demonstration of chat bot emulator:

Installation

Howdy binaries have no external dependencies.

To get the binary just download the latest release for your OS/Arch from the release page and put the binary somewhere convenient. You can run it from any location:

$ ./howdy_linux_amd64 
    .:: Please go to http://127.0.0.1:8081/index.html ::.

Note: you need to “chmod +x” binaries on Unix-like platforms.

Alternatively, you can pull the latest Docker image:

$ docker pull pavel/howdy
$ docker run -t -i --net="host" -p 8081:8081 pavel/howdy
    .:: Please go to http://127.0.0.1:8081/index.html ::.

Usage

Simply follow these steps:

• Modify your bot so that it uses “http://127.0.0.1:8081/“ instead of “https://api.telegram.org/“.
• Use “token” as an authentication token.
• Start both chat bot and bot emulator.
• Navigate to “http://127.0.0.1:8081/index.html“ in your favorite browser.
• Enjoy!

Limitations (aka to-do list)

Currently, there are a couple limitations:

• Not all Telegram API are covered yet. For instance, it’s not possible to send images or stickers.
• Keyboard layout is ignored (all buttons are displayed as a column).

Building from the source

First, install these dependencies:

go get -u github.com/kardianos/govendor
go get -u github.com/jteeuwen/go-bindata/...

Pull third-party packages into vendor folder:

govendor sync

Build the emulator:

go-bindata --debug app/...
go build

Note: the last step is equivalent to running “make”.