# Telegram notifications

Bitcart makes use of the [Apprise](https://github.com/caronc/apprise) API to deliver notifications to Telegram.

![](https://4146767839-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2F-Lz8A22xAOkwN-WbWyqG%2Fuploads%2Fgit-blob-b92fc56b95e8fe641fdcfda3f656bd22eb764814%2Ftelegram_notification_setup.jpg?alt=media)

To integrate Telegram with Bitcart, you by-and-large follow the procedure outlined in the [Setup Guide](https://appriseit.com/services/telegram). However, there are few recommendations and gotchas.

## Multiple recipients

You can deliver the notifications to multiple telegram users by providing multiple chat ids, separated by spaces.

## Markdown templates

Due to a [bug](https://github.com/caronc/apprise/issues/1178#issuecomment-2269802339), if you select `markdown` as the template format, you should leave the `markdown version` field blank, or set it to `1`. Contrary to the apprise documentation, specifying `2` or `v2` here will result in messages not being delivered.

Telegram only supports a subset of markdown. It pays to read the [Telegram docs](https://core.telegram.org/api/entities#allowed-entities) to see what's supported.

If there are any mistakes, the message gets rendered as text (at best), or (usually) apprise rejects the notification with a "bad parse" error. This is true of user input too. If promo code is `FREE_STUFF`, the underscore is interpreted as the start of italics and will break all the formatting.

For this reason, you *must* escape all input in your templates, especially user-provided input like email addresses, notes, and shipping addresses. Bitcart provides a ready filter for markdown v1, e.g. `{{ invoice.buyer_email|tg_escape }}`.

But if you're doing anything but the simplest of reports, it's *highly* recommended to just switch HTML templates over Markdown.

## HTML templates

For more complicated notifications, prefer HTML templates. Again, Telegram has limited support for HTML, but the Jinja templating engine has better support for escaping HTML entities.

See [the HTML notification template example](https://docs.bitcart.ai/examples/templates#html-notification-template) for a working example.