Hosting: Fly

This guide tells you about the ways you can host your grammY bots on Flyopen in new window, either using Deno or Node.js.

Preparing Your Code

You can run your bot using both webhooks or long polling.

Webhooks

Remember that you should not call bot.start() in your code when using webhooks.

  1. Make sure that you have a file which exports your Bot object, so that you can import it later to run it.
  2. Create a file named app.ts or app.js, or actually any name you like (but you should be remembering and using this as the main file to deploy), with the following content:
import { serve } from "https://deno.land/std@0.177.1/http/server.ts";
import { webhookCallback } from "https://deno.land/x/grammy@v1.16.1/mod.ts";
// You might modify this to the correct way to import your `Bot` object.
import { bot } from "./bot.ts";

const port = 8000;
const handleUpdate = webhookCallback(bot, "std/http");

serve(async (req) => {
  const url = new URL(req.url);
  if (req.method === "POST" && url.pathname.slice(1) === bot.token) {
    try {
      return await handleUpdate(req);
    } catch (err) {
      console.error(err);
    }
  }
  return new Response();
}, { port });










 








import express from "express";
import { webhookCallback } from "grammy";
// You might modify this to the correct way to import your `Bot` object.
import { bot } from "./bot";

const port = 8000;
const app = express();

app.use(express.json());
app.use(`/${bot.token}`, webhookCallback(bot, "express"));
app.use((_req, res) => res.status(200).send());

app.listen(port, () => console.log(`listening on port ${port}`));









 



We advise you to have your handler on some secret path rather than the root (/). As shown in the highlighted line above, we are using the bot token (/<bot token>) as the secret path.

Long Polling

Create a file named app.ts or app.js, or actually any name you like (but you should be remembering and using this as the main file to deploy), with the following content:

import { Bot } from "https://deno.land/x/grammy@v1.16.1/mod.ts";

const token = Deno.env.get("BOT_TOKEN");
if (!token) throw new Error("BOT_TOKEN is unset");

const bot = new Bot(token); 

bot.command(
  "start",
  (ctx) => ctx.reply("I'm running on Fly using long polling!"),
);

Deno.addSignalListener("SIGINT", () => bot.stop());
Deno.addSignalListener("SIGTERM", () => bot.stop());

bot.start();



 












import { Bot } from "grammy";

const token = process.env.BOT_TOKEN;
if (!token) throw new Error("BOT_TOKEN is unset");

const bot = new Bot(token);

bot.command(
  "start",
  (ctx) => ctx.reply("I'm running on Fly using long polling!"),
);

process.once("SIGINT", () => bot.stop());
process.once("SIGTERM", () => bot.stop());

bot.start();



 












As you can see in the highlighted line above, we take some sensitive values (your bot token) from environment variables. Fly allow us to store that secret by running this command:

flyctl secrets set BOT_TOKEN="AAAA:12345"

You can specify other secrets in the same way. For more information about this secrets, see https://fly.io/docs/reference/secrets/open in new window.

Deploying

Method 1: With flyctl

This is the easiest method to go with.

  1. Install flyctlopen in new window and sign inopen in new window.
  2. Run flyctl launch to generate a Dockerfile and fly.toml file for deployment. But DO NOT deploy.
flyctl launch
Creating app in /my/telegram/bot
Scanning source code
Detected a Deno app
? App Name (leave blank to use an auto-generated name): grammy
Automatically selected personal organization: CatDestroyer
? Select region: ams (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Created app grammy in organization personal
Wrote config file fly.toml
? Would you like to set up a Postgresql database now? No
? Would you like to deploy now? No
Your app is ready. Deploy with `flyctl deploy`









 

flyctl launch
Creating app in /my/telegram/bot
Scanning source code
Detected a NodeJS app
Using the following build configuration:
        Builder: heroku/buildpacks:20
? App Name (leave blank to use an auto-generated name): grammy
Automatically selected personal organization: CatDestroyer
? Select region: ams (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Created app grammy in organization personal
Wrote config file fly.toml
? Would you like to set up a Postgresql database now? No
? Would you like to deploy now? No
Your app is ready. Deploy with `flyctl deploy`











 

  1. Deno: Change the Deno version and remove CMD if exist within the Dockerfile file. For example, in this case, we update DENO_VERSION to 1.25.2.

    Node.js: To change the Node.js version, you need to insert a "node" property inside an "engines" property inside package.json. For instance, we update the Node.js version to 16.14.0 in the example below.

# Dockerfile
ARG DENO_VERSION=1.25.2
ARG BIN_IMAGE=denoland/deno:bin-${DENO_VERSION}
FROM ${BIN_IMAGE} AS bin

FROM frolvlad/alpine-glibc:alpine-3.13

RUN apk --no-cache add ca-certificates

RUN addgroup --gid 1000 deno \
  && adduser --uid 1000 --disabled-password deno --ingroup deno \
  && mkdir /deno-dir/ \
  && chown deno:deno /deno-dir/

ENV DENO_DIR /deno-dir/
ENV DENO_INSTALL_ROOT /usr/local

ARG DENO_VERSION
ENV DENO_VERSION=${DENO_VERSION}
COPY --from=bin /deno /bin/deno

WORKDIR /deno-dir
COPY . .

ENTRYPOINT ["/bin/deno"]
# CMD is removed

 























 
// package.json
{
  "name": "grammy",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "grammy",
  "main": "app.js",
  "author": "itsmeMario",
  "license": "MIT",
  "dependencies": {
    "express": "^4.18.1",
    "grammy": "^1.11.0"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "@types/express": "^4.17.14",
    "@types/node": "^18.7.18",
    "typescript": "^4.8.3"
  },
  "engines": {
    "node": "16.14.0"
  }
}


















 


  1. Edit app inside the fly.toml file. The path ./app.ts (or ./app.js for Node.js) in the example below refers to the main file directory. You might modify them to match with your project’s directory. If you are using webhooks, make sure the port is same as the one in your configuration (8000).
# fly.toml
app = "grammy"
kill_signal = "SIGINT"
kill_timeout = 5

[processes]
  app = "run --allow-net ./app.ts"

[[services]]
  http_checks = []
  internal_port = 8000
  processes = ["app"]
  protocol = "tcp"
  script_checks = []
  [services.concurrency]
    hard_limit = 25
    soft_limit = 20
    type = "connections"

  [[services.ports]]
    force_https = true
    handlers = ["http"]
    port = 80

  [[services.ports]]
    handlers = ["tls", "http"]
    port = 443

  [[services.tcp_checks]]
    grace_period = "1s"
    interval = "15s"
    restart_limit = 0
    timeout = "2s"






 



 
 





















# fly.toml
app = "grammy"
kill_signal = "SIGINT"
kill_timeout = 5

[processes]
  app = "run --allow-net ./app.ts"

# Simply omitting the whole [[services]] section 
# since we are not listening to HTTP






 



# fly.toml
app = "grammy"
kill_signal = "SIGINT"
kill_timeout = 5

[processes]
  app = "node ./build/app.js"

# Adjust the NODE_ENV environment variable to suppress the warning
[build.args]
  NODE_ENV = "production"

[build]
  builder = "heroku/buildpacks:20"

[[services]]
  http_checks = []
  internal_port = 8000
  processes = ["app"]
  protocol = "tcp"
  script_checks = []
  [services.concurrency]
    hard_limit = 25
    soft_limit = 20
    type = "connections"

  [[services.ports]]
    force_https = true
    handlers = ["http"]
    port = 80

  [[services.ports]]
    handlers = ["tls", "http"]
    port = 443

  [[services.tcp_checks]]
    grace_period = "1s"
    interval = "15s"
    restart_limit = 0
    timeout = "2s"






 



 






 
 





















# fly.toml
app = "grammy"
kill_signal = "SIGINT"
kill_timeout = 5

[processes]
  app = "node ./build/app.js"

# Adjust the NODE_ENV environment variable to suppress the warning
[build.args]
  NODE_ENV = "production"

[build]
  builder = "heroku/buildpacks:20"

# Simply omitting the whole of the [[services]] section since we are not listening to HTTP.






 



 





  1. Run flyctl deploy to deploy your code.

Method 2: With GitHub Actions

The main advantage of following method is that Fly will watch for changes in your repository which includes your bot code, and it will deploy new versions automatically. Visit https://fly.io/docs/app-guides/continuous-deployment-with-github-actionsopen in new window for more detailed instructions.

  1. Install flyctlopen in new window and sign inopen in new window.
  2. Get a Fly API token by running flyctl auth token.
  3. Create a repository on GitHub, it can be either private or public.
  4. Go to Settings, choose Secrets and create a secret called FLY_API_TOKEN with the value of the token from step 2.
  5. Create .github/workflows/main.yml with these contents:
name: Fly Deploy
on: [push]
env:
  FLY_API_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.FLY_API_TOKEN }}
jobs:
  deploy:
      name: Deploy app
      runs-on: ubuntu-latest
      steps:
        - uses: actions/checkout@v2
        - uses: superfly/flyctl-actions/setup-flyctl@master
        - run: flyctl deploy --remote-only
  1. Follow steps 2 until 4 from Method 1 above. Remember to skip the last step (step 5) since we are not deploying the code directly.
  2. Commit your changes and push them up to GitHub.
  3. This is where the magic happens—the push will have triggered a deploy and from now on, whenever you push a change, the app will automatically be redeployed.

Setting the Webhook URL

If you are using webhooks, after getting your app running, you should configure your bot’s webhook settings to point to your app. To do that, send a request to

https://api.telegram.org/bot<token>/setWebhook?url=<url>

replacing <token> with your bot’s token, and <url> with the full URL of your app along with the path to the webhook handler.

Dockerfile Optimization

When our Dockerfile is run, it copies everything from the directory over to the Docker image. For Node.js applications, some directories like node_modules are going to be rebuilt anyway so there’s no need to copy them. Create a .dockerignore file and add node_modules to it to do this. You can also use .dockerignore to not copy any other files which aren’t needed at runtime.

Reference