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TIL - Good bye emails welcome Telegram Alerts

How to send a telegram alert when your code finished running

If you're doing machine learning or any kind of analysis using Python, you probably have been in a situation where you launch scripts that takes several minutes or hours to complete. In these situations you want to have a way to be notified that they finished with success.
You have different solutions for this, but my favorite for now that I will show you in this TIL is to create a Telegram Bot that can send you message alerts directly on your phone. Telegram Conversation Screenshot This is very simple to set up and also compatible with any language that can make a simple GET/POST request.

Telegram Bot Setup

  1. On your telegram account, send a DM containing /newbot to https://t.me/BotFather to create your bot. You will receive a token. Save this token.
  2. Then search for your bot name using the search bar and send it a message. And visit https://api.telegram.org/bot<YOUR_BOT_TOKEN>/getUpdates You will find here a JSON containing your account chatID inside: result.0.message.from.id: <YOUR_CHAT_ID>. Save this ID.
  3. With this token and this ID you can now send yourself alerts using some simple GET request to the URL https://api.telegram.org/bot<YOUR_BOT_TOKEN/sendMessage?chat_id=<YOUR_CHAT_ID>&text=<TEXT_OF_THE_ALERT>

Here is an example of a function in pure python that you can copy paste in your code and call to send an alert easily:

import requests
def send_telegram_alert(message="Finished Running"):
    # Replace 'YOUR_BOT_TOKEN' with the token you received from the BotFather
    bot_token = "<YOUR_BOT_TOKEN>"
    # Replace 'YOUR_CHAT_ID' with your Telegram chat id
    chat_id = "<YOUR_CHAT_ID>"
    # Set the API endpoint and the message text
    api_endpoint = f"https://api.telegram.org/bot{bot_token}/sendMessage"

    # Make the API request
    response = requests.post(api_endpoint, json={"chat_id": chat_id, "text": message})
send_telegram_alert("Hey Corentin, your training finished running !")

But you can also do the same for bash scripts !

bot_token='<YOUR_BOT_TOKEN>'
chat_id='<YOUR_CHAT_ID>'
api_endpoint="https://api.telegram.org/bot$bot_token/sendMessage"
message_text='Hey Corentin, your training finished running !'
curl -s -X POST $api_endpoint -d chat_id=$chat_id -d text="$message_text"

And you could even do specific alerts when something failed:

try:
    my_main_script_func()
    send_telegram_alert("Your script finished running !")
except:
    send_telegram_alert("Woops, something went wrong !")

I think that a pretty cool tool simpler than email, effortless to setup and faster than manually checking !