Getting started

🛠️ Installation

The steps to get this framework ready and to start developing your Telegram Bot are:

• Download and install PHP and Composer. You'll use Composer to eventually update packages.
• Clone this repository on your server (or locally) with the following command:

git clone https://github.com/giuseppetrivi/StatefulBot-framework.git

• Create a Telegram Bot via @BotFather (here is a simple guide).
• Set the webhook to the hook.php file and fill the config.json file with necessary information (like Telegram Bot API token).
• Before making the first changes, choose your Telegram Bot name and execute the following command (using Git Bash) to change the main namespace name (better explained in Chapter 3), putting it in the place of <HERE_YOUR_BOT_NAME>:

cd /path/to/project/
find . -type f -name "*.php" -exec sed -i 's/CustomBotName/<HERE_YOUR_BOT_NAME>/g' {} +

📚 Mention to packages used from this project

The Composer packages in this framework are the following:

• telegram-bot-sdk: a PHP Telegram Bot SDK to handle the requests from/to Telegram Bot
• meekro: a PHP library to easily interface with database and SQL queries
• phpunit: a PHP framework for writing tests and a command-line tool for running these tests

📝 Code style

The code style followed in the files of this project (except for the external library classes) is the following:

TYPE	STYLE
class instance variable	$_InstanceName
class definition	ClassName
attribute or variable	snake_case_var
method or function	camelCaseFun
constants	SNAKE_UPPERCASE_CONST

📐 Architecture

The architecture of the framework is shown in the following diagram and resembles an MVC (Model-View-Controller). The three white squares are the three architectural main components: the controller (in the middle) calls the view (left) to show the "UI" and calls the entities of model (right) to use data from database, Telegram Bot API service and any other external service (low, outside the box).
The ConfigurationHandler class is where the configuration properties are handled (Chapter 5) and the Init class is the class where the request's processing starts (Chapter 4).

🗂️ Folder structure and files

These are the main folders of the framework project:

• config/ contains configuration files and a class to handle it
• control/ contains classes that handles the logic of the state management of the bot
• docs/ contains some useful documents about the project [not necessary]
• entities/ contains classes that communicate with external services (like APIs or a database), or classes that implements some specific objects
• exceptions/ contains custom exceptions
• init/ contains the Init class, where the request's processing starts
• logs/ is a folder to store logs
• vendor/ contains Composer's downloaded packages
• view/ contains classes to handle the messages shown to the final user on the bot and everything about the "UI" of the bot (messages, emoticons, buttons, etc...)

You can read the folders entities/, view/ and control/processes/ respectively as the MVC folders.

Instead, these are the files in the main folder of the framework project:

• hook.php is the file to be set as Telegram Bot webhook and is the first file to be called for each bot's request
• file_to_test_snippets.php is a simple file to test the server or some specific functionality [not necessary]
• composer.json and composer.lock contain the configurations of Composer packages
• project_autoloader.php is the autoloader file that sets up the autoloading rules using the class Psr4AutoloaderClass, which follows the PSR-4 standard