How to obtain Telegram chat_id for a specific user?

Question

How to obtain user chat_id in Telegram bot API? The documentation says:

Integer | Unique identifier for the message recipient — User or G

Answer 1

First, post a message in a chat where your bot is included (channel, group mentioning the bot, or one-to-one chat). Then, just run:

curl https://api.telegram.org/bot/getUpdates | jq

Feel free to remove the | jq part if your dont have jq installed, it's only useful for pretty printing. You should get something like this:

You can see the chat ID in the returned json object, together with the chat name and associated message.