FIX: Telegram Webhooks Not Working

Telegram messenger recently released an API that lets you easily create bots for their platform.  After deciding to have a bit of a play with it, I found that I had an issue where the webhooks would not send any updates to my server with no apparent error.

The Problem

I made all the following checks:

1. Valid SSL certificate
2. Webhook successfully registered using the Telegram setWebhook method
3. The method responded properly when I sent a test request using a REST service tester
4. Server access logs – look like Telegram had never even hit the server

The Solution

After a full day of searching, testing and bashing my head against the keyboard, I found this thread on Reddit, where the user described a problem where a full chained certificate was required on the server, not just the server certificate.

To create chained certificate you’ll need to have a look at what instructions your certificate issuer provides.

In my case the certificate being used was a Comodo PositiveSSL, for which I downloaded all the certificates that they sent, which contained:

• Root CA Certificate – AddTrustExternalCARoot.crt
• Intermediate CA Certificate – COMODORSAAddTrustCA.crt
• Intermediate CA Certificate – COMODORSADomainValidationSecureServerCA.crt
• Your PositiveSSL Certificate – my_domain.crt

I had to combine them all into a file in the following order:

• my_domain.crt
• COMODORSADomainValidationSecureServerCA.crt
• COMODORSAAddTrustCA.crt
• AddTrustExternalCARoot.crt

For the example above the command would have been:

cat my_domain.crt COMODORSADomainValidationSecureServerCA.crt AddTrustExternalCARoot.crt COMODORSAAddTrustCA.crt > bundle.crt

After that it was just a case of uploading the new bundle.crt to my server, updating the nginx config, and hey presto, within minutes I was receiving all the responses for my webhooks