thecodegalaxy/appointment-telegram-bot-template

This project is a ready-made template for building a Telegram bot that lets customers book appointments, such as with a salon, clinic, or service business. Rather than writing a booking bot from scratch, a developer can take this template, plug in their own business details, and have a working bot running the same day. Customers interact with the bot through a step-by-step guided conversation: they pick a service, choose how many people are booking, select a date, choose a time slot, and confirm. Returning customers who have booked before can skip re-entering their name and phone number, since the bot already remembers them. The system prevents two customers from booking the exact same time slot by enforcing a uniqueness rule directly in the database. Business owners get a separate admin view inside the same bot, showing a simple numbered list of today's and upcoming bookings, along with the ability to cancel appointments. Instead of manually typing in the list of services offered, an admin can upload an Excel or CSV spreadsheet listing each service's name, duration, and whether it is currently active, and the bot imports them automatically. The bot supports both English and Arabic, including Arabic-formatted dates, so it can serve bilingual customer bases out of the box. It also runs an automatic daily cleanup job that removes old booking records after a set number of days, seven for admin records and fourteen for user records, so the database does not grow indefinitely without manual maintenance. Under the hood it is built in Python using the python-telegram-bot library, SQLAlchemy for talking to a SQLite database asynchronously, and pandas for reading spreadsheet uploads. Setting it up involves creating a bot through Telegram's BotFather, getting your own Telegram user ID, installing Python 3.12 or newer, installing the project's dependencies, and filling in a configuration file with your bot's token and admin IDs before running it.