A webhook is an HTTP endpoint that Telegram calls automatically whenever an event occurs — such as a user sending a message to a bot, a join request arriving, or a payment being confirmed. Instead of your server repeatedly polling the Telegram API, Telegram pushes updates to your endpoint in real time. Autogram registers a webhook with Telegram to receive updates that trigger automations, process identity verification codes, and handle channel events without polling overhead.
Telegram will only deliver to an HTTPS URL, and only on a short list of permitted ports. You can register a secret token at the same time; Telegram then echoes it in a header on every delivery, which is how the receiver distinguishes a genuine update from a forged POST to a public URL. Only one delivery mode is active at a time, so long polling stops returning updates once a webhook is set.
Telegram expects a 2xx response. Anything else is retried a bounded number of times and then abandoned, so a handler that crashes on a malformed payload can lose that update permanently. Because updates are pushed rather than pulled, a slow handler becomes a queue: the standard shape is to acknowledge immediately and do the real work on a background worker.
A webhook can be narrowed to specific update types, and the default set deliberately omits a few noisy ones that must be requested explicitly. Narrowing cuts traffic noticeably but silently hides events you forgot to ask for. When automations go quiet, the first thing to read is the webhook status the API returns — it reports how many updates are waiting for delivery and the most recent error.
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