Node telegram bot api - disable processing of updates sent before the bot starts

I, have this issue: when I start the bot it immediately starts looking for updates. However, in my particular case (especially during the developing) this can be very frustrating and uncomfortable. There is a way to tell the bot to process the update sent after the starting of the bot itself?

Thank you

You need to tell Telegram to "forget" those updates. This is how you would do it:

1. Send a request to: https://api.telegram.org/bot$TELEGRAM_TOKEN/getUpdates
2. Get the message_id of the last element (pop) of the result array
3. Send another request https://api.telegram.org/bot$TELEGRAM_TOKEN/getUpdates?offset=$OFFSET where $OFFSET is the message_id + 1

This is a stateless way of clearing pending requests. You can use curl,the browser or a request library (recommended) to do this. You can do this with node-telegram-bot-api but I don't recommend since you will have to create 2 bot instances, 1 polling and 1 non polling to clear the updates which is not a good practice since ntba doesn't decouple its methods in a different class.

So in pseudocode code:

const TOKEN = 'MY_TOKEN'

async function clearUpdates(token) {
  const { result } = await request.get(`https://api.telegram.org/bot${token}/getUpdates`).json()
  
  return await request.get(`https://api.telegram.org/bot${token}/getUpdates?offset=${result[result.length - 1].message_id + 1}`)
}

Now run clearUpdates before starting your bot.