Telegram check if user is admin

Question

I am using the telegram bot api to make a bot. I have some commands that can only be sent from admins. Like kick and ban commands. How do I check if the sender is an admin or not? I am using the python-telegram-bot api. I do not want everyone to be able to ban members.

Answer 1

You can use getChatMember method. See following instance:

Answer 2

I have found after searching a bit. The admin status is stored under Telegram.ChatMember.status. It is documented here. It is used by bot.get_chat_member(chat_id, user_id). And then getting status in it.

Answer 3

The other answers are correct, but require an additional call to the API. An efficient solution is to cache the list of admins.

A good solution for this is described here, copied below:

---

Cached Telegram group administrator check

If you want to limit certain bot functions to group administrators, you have to test if a user is an administrator in the group in question. This however requires an extra API request, which is why it can make sense to cache this information for a certain time, especially if your bot is very busy.

This snippet requires this timeout-based cache decorator. (gist mirror)

Save the decorator to a new file named mwt.py and add this line to your imports:

from mwt import MWT

Then, add the following decorated function to your script. You can change the timeout as required.

@MWT(timeout=60*60)
def get_admin_ids(bot, chat_id):
    """Returns a list of admin IDs for a given chat. Results are cached for 1 hour."""
    return [admin.user.id for admin in bot.get_chat_administrators(chat_id)]

You can then use the function like this:

if update.message.from_user.id in get_admin_ids(bot, update.message.chat_id):
    # admin only

Note: Private chats and groups with all_members_are_administrator flag, are not covered by this snippet. Make sure you handle them.