How to deploy a telegram bot on AWS Lambda for free
Table of Contents
Some years ago I developed a little telegram bot called comptrain-individuals that parses WODs from Comptrain and post them on a telegram Channel called @CompTrainIndividuals. The problem was, in order to deploy it and have it online 24/7 I was using a free account on OpenRedshift, which forced me to recreate an account every 60 days and re-deploy everything again.
Recently I came out across a solution using AWS Lambda and its free tier products and since then I have had no problems at all. I only needed to deploy it once and it has been working since then. Today I want to tell you how you can do the same for your telegram bots.
Set up a AWS account using AWS free tier
In order to do that, just go to https://aws.amazon.com/free/ and create an account. You are going to use an AWS Lambda to deploy the bot there.
Create and set up a lambda function
I will not go over the details on how to create a lambda function, since there are plenty of resources for that, as I am using serverless, you can read their documentation on AWS Lambda.
Serverless configuration
For my telegram bot, I am using a configuration that just execute the bot every day at 4AM:
service: comptrain-bot
provider:
name: aws
runtime: python3.7
region: eu-central-1
functions:
comptrain:
handler: handler.main
events:
- schedule: cron(0 4 * * ? *)
Deploy the code to AWS lambda
Last step, in order to deploy our function to AWS, you need to use either aws-vault or awscli and set it up to use your credentials. Once you have done this, you can upload your function code using this steps:
#!/bin/bash sls deploy # if you are using python with poetry, this is the way of package dependencies cd .venv/lib/python3.7/site-packages zip -r9 ${OLDPWD}/function.zip . cd $OLDPWD zip -g function.zip handler.py aws lambda update-function-code --function-name comptrain-bot-dev-comptrain --zip-file fileb://function.zip rm function.zip
In order to package a python virtual environment you need to follow the steps specified in Deploy Python Lambda functions with .zip file archives
And that's it! hope it helps.