How to get a Telegram alert from your smart home (Home Assistant step by step)

A phone notification you actually read beats an app you never open. Telegram is a handy place for home alerts: a door left open, a washing machine that finished, a temperature that is too high. Here is the setup in plain steps.

What you need

• A Telegram account on your phone.
• Home Assistant, the free, open-source home automation hub (Apache-2.0).
• About twenty minutes.

Step by step

1. Create a bot. In Telegram, message @BotFather, send /newbot, choose a name and save the API token it gives you. Treat the token like a password.
2. Find your chat ID. Message the GetIDs bot with /start, or read it from the getUpdates response after you message your own bot.
3. Add the Telegram bot integration in Home Assistant using your token.
4. Create a notifier with your chat ID. The Home Assistant documentation currently marks the older notify platform for deprecation and recommends the Telegram bot integration, so follow the current docs for the exact screen or syntax.
5. Open your bot and send /start. Bots cannot message you first, so this step is required.
6. Test it by calling your notify action with a short message.

Ideas for your first alerts

• Front door opened while nobody is home.
• Water-leak sensor triggered.
• Washing machine or oven finished.
• Morning summary: weather, heating state and what is on today.

Prefer not to run a home hub?

Any Telegram alert follows the same pattern: a trigger, a bot token and a chat ID. n8n has a Telegram node with a Send Message operation, so any workflow can end in a chat alert, and developers can write their own with python-telegram-bot, a Python library that needs a script hosted somewhere that stays online. The Telegram Bot API itself is called over HTTPS with your bot token.

Good to know

Home Assistant takes time to set up and the project recommends dedicated hardware. Keep your bot token private and only message chat IDs you trust.

See more ideas

Browse the use cases to see what bots can do at home, or try the live demo. Custom bots are coming soon: tell me when it opens.