How to get GitHub notifications in Telegram

Updated August 2026 · 5 min read

Telegram is a popular home for developer notifications because it's fast, free, works on every platform, and its bots are trivially easy to talk to. There are three realistic ways to get GitHub activity into a Telegram chat — each with different trade-offs in setup effort, noise, and what it can see. Here they are, from easiest to most powerful.

Method 1: IFTTT (no code)

Create an IFTTT applet: If New notification from GitHub, then Send message to Telegram bot. Connect both accounts, pick the trigger "new notification", and choose the chat the bot should message.

The catch: GitHub's IFTTT trigger is coarse. You get a ping per notification event, but little control over which events, and the applet fires on public activity patterns rather than your personal notification inbox. Fine for "tell me when my repo gets a star or new release"; wrong tool for "tell me when I'm asked to review something".

Method 2: A webhook into your own Telegram bot

Full control version: create a bot via @BotFather, note the token, then point a GitHub repository webhook at a tiny relay (a Cloudflare Worker is free and takes ~50 lines) that reshapes GitHub's JSON payload and calls:

You decide exactly which events become messages — pull requests, review requests, CI failures — and how they're formatted.

The catch: repository webhooks only fire on events in repos that have the webhook installed, and you own the code forever: retries, rate limits, format changes on either side. It's a weekend project that needs a maintainer. Worth it if you enjoy building it; otherwise it's overhead.

Method 3: Email forwarding (GitHub → email → Telegram)

GitHub already emails you every notification. Telegram can catch those: forward your GitHub notification address ([email protected]) through an email-to-Telegram bridge, or use a service like a mail-bot that dumps incoming mail into a private chat. Zero code, and you automatically get everything your GitHub inbox already includes — including review requests and @mentions.

The catch: you inherit the noise of email notifications. Unless you've carefully tuned your watching and filters on GitHub, the chat fills with everything from every watched repo, and important reviews drown between dependabot PRs and CI pings. It also arrives as raw email text rather than a clean, tappable card.

Or skip the relay entirely: keep them native

Here's the honest question behind "GitHub notifications in Telegram": what you actually want is not to miss the PR assigned to you. Telegram is just the place your phone already buzzes loudest.

If you work on a computer for a living, there's a more direct route: a menu bar app that shows your unread GitHub notification count next to the clock all day. You glance, you click, you're in the pull request. No bots to maintain, no IFTTT latency (which regularly runs minutes behind), and no risk of your one important review drowning between 200 deploy messages.

This covers what every Telegram method structurally can't do well: filtering down to notifications about you specifically — review requests, @mentions, CI failures on your branches — because it reads your personal notifications endpoint with your token. Everything stays local on your machine; nothing is routed through a third-party bot that could read it.

Which should you pick?

• Zero effort, casual signals? Method 1 — IFTTT.
• Custom routing and you enjoy maintaining a bot? Method 2 — webhooks.
• Everything, but noisy? Method 3 — email forwarding.
• Your own signal, instantly, without plumbing? A menu bar app. It answers the actual need directly.