Cinema Bot — Telegram movie distribution in PHP

## Stack

• PHP 7.4+ (8.x recommended)
• MySQL 5.7+ (8.x recommended)
• Telegram Bot API via webhook
• cURL extension
• mbstring extension for Cyrillic/Uzbek

No frameworks. No Composer. No dependencies. Just cinemabot.php and a database.

## Setup (5 minutes)

### 1. Create a bot

1. Open @BotFather on Telegram → /newbot
2. Save the token (looks like 123456:ABC...)

### 2. Database sql CREATE DATABASE cinema CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci; CREATE USER 'cinema'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'strong-password'; GRANT ALL ON cinema.* TO 'cinema'@'localhost';

Tables are auto-created on first webhook hit (via CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS). No manual schema needed.

### 3. Configure Open cinemabot.php and replace the placeholders at the top: `php define('API_KEY', "YOUR_BOT_TOKEN"); $admin = "YOUR_TELEGRAM_USER_ID"; // get from @userinfobot

define("db_server", "localhost"); define("db_username", "cinema"); define("db_password", "strong-password"); define("db_name", "cinema"); `

### 4. Upload + set webhook Upload cinemabot.php to your server (any shared hosting, VPS, or even free PHP hosts work). Then register the webhook:

https://api.telegram.org/bot<YOUR_TOKEN>/setWebhook?url=https://yoursite.com/cinemabot.php

That's it. Send /start to your bot — you'll see the admin panel.

### 5. Add your first movie

1. Send the bot any video (forwarded from your private channel works too)
2. The bot will store the file_id
3. Open admin panel → 🎬 Kinolar → set the code, name, description

Now any user can send the code and get the movie.

## Admin panel — what's where

## Customization

The bot's UI is fully Uzbek. Strings are hardcoded — search for bot('sendMessage' to find user-facing text and translate as needed. Same for emoji-prefixed buttons (📊 Statistika, etc.).

For multi-language support, swap hardcoded strings with a translation function: php function t($key, $lang = 'uz') { $translations = [ 'welcome' => ['uz' => 'Xush kelibsiz', 'ru' => 'Добро пожаловать'], // ... ]; return $translations[$key][$lang] ?? $key; }

## Security notes

The included file uses mysqli_query with concatenated variables. Validate all user input before deploying to a public bot — Telegram message text passes through $text, callback data through $data. The codebase trusts these reasonably (everything goes through mysqli_real_escape_string paths or numeric casts), but a security audit is recommended before high-traffic use.

For webhook security, set a secret token: ?secret_token=YOUR_SECRET And verify it in the webhook handler.

## What I learned building this

1. file_id is the win. Telegram caches every file you've ever uploaded to a bot — store the file_id, send it

back, no storage cost.

1. Forced subscription = retention. Even toxic, but ~3-5x more sustained channel growth than organic for cinema

content in CIS.

1. Manual payments beat Stripe at scale here. Click/Payme/card transfer is what users actually use in Uzbekistan;

integrate the gateway later when you have proven demand.

1. Webhooks on shared hosting are fine. PHP bots on $2/mo cPanel hosts handle 10k+ daily users without breaking a

sweat. Don't over-engineer.

## Roadmap (open contributions)

• [ ] Migrate to PHP 8 strict types + PDO (drop mysqli)
• [ ] Composer + PSR-4 autoload
• [ ] Translation framework (uz/ru/en)
• [ ] Telegram Stars integration (auto-billing instead of manual)
• [ ] Web admin dashboard (instead of in-bot)
• [ ] Migration tool: cinemabot → Node.js / Python rewrite