The extension class telegram.ext.JobQueue allows you to perform tasks with a delay or even periodically, at a set interval. Among many other things, you can use it to send regular updates to your subscribers.

• PTBs JobQueue provides an easy to use and ready to use way of scheduling tasks in a way that ties in with the PTB architecture
• Managing scheduling logic is not the main intend of PTB and hence as of v13 a third party library is used
• If you need highly customized scheduling thingies, you can use advanced features of the third party library
• We can't guarantee that the backend will stay the same forever. For example, if the third party library is discontinued, we will have to look for alternatives.

In addition to the tutorial below, there is also the timerbot.py example at the examples directory.

pip install python-telegram-bot[job-queue]

The JobQueue class is tightly integrated with other telegram.ext classes.

To use the JobQueue, you don't have to do much. When you build the Application, it will create a JobQueue for you:

from telegram.ext import Application

application = Application.builder().token('TOKEN').build()
job_queue = application.job_queue

Just know that unless you have a good reason to do so, you should not instantiate JobQueue yourself.

Tasks in the job queue are encapsulated by the Job class. It takes a callback function as a parameter, which will be executed when the time comes. This callback function always takes exactly one parameter: context, a telegram.ext.CallbackContext. Like in the case of handler callbacks used by the Application, through this object you can access

• context.bot, the Application's telegram.Bot instance
• context.job_queue, the same object as application.job_queue above
• and for this particular case you can also access context.job, which is the Job instance of the task that triggered the callback (more on that later).

You can use the following methods to create jobs with different frequency and time: job_queue.run_once, job_queue.run_repeating, job_queue.run_daily and job_queue.run_monthly. (As before, you do not usually need to instantiate the Job class directly.)

Add your first job to the queue by defining a callback function and adding it to the job queue. For this tutorial, you can replace '@examplechannel' with a channel where your bot is an admin, or by your user id (use @userinfobot to find out your user id):

from telegram.ext import ContextTypes, Application

async def callback_minute(context: ContextTypes.DEFAULT_TYPE):
    await context.bot.send_message(chat_id='@examplechannel', text='One message every minute')

application = Application.builder().token('TOKEN').build()
job_queue = application.job_queue

job_minute = job_queue.run_repeating(callback_minute, interval=60, first=10)

application.run_polling()

The callback_minute function will be executed every 60.0 seconds, the first time being after 10 seconds (because of first=10). The interval and first parameters are in seconds if they are int or float. They can also be datetime objects. See the docs for detailed explanation. The return value of these functions are the Job objects being created. You don't need to store the result of run_repeating (which is the newly instantiated Job) if you don't need it; we will make use of it later in this tutorial.

You can also add a job that will be executed only once, with a delay:

from telegram.ext import ContextTypes, Application

async def callback_30(context: ContextTypes.DEFAULT_TYPE):
    await context.bot.send_message(chat_id='@examplechannel', text='A single message with 30s delay')

application = Application.builder().token('TOKEN').build()
job_queue = application.job_queue

job_queue.run_once(callback_30, 30)

application.run_polling()

In thirty seconds, you should receive the message from callback_30.

If you are tired of receiving a message every minute, you can temporarily disable a job or even completely remove it from the queue:

job_minute.enabled = False  # Temporarily disable this job
job_minute.schedule_removal()  # Remove this job completely

You might want to add jobs in response to certain user input, and there is a convenient way to do that. The context argument of your Handler callbacks has the JobQueue attached as context.job_queue ready to be used. Another feature you can use here are the data, chat_id or user_id keyword arguments of Job. You can pass any object as a data parameter when you launch a Job and retrieve it at a later stage as long as the Job exists. The chat_id/user_id parameter allows for an easy way to let the Job know which chat we're talking about. This way, we can access context.chat_data/context.user_data in the job's callback. Let's see how it looks in code:

from telegram import Update
from telegram.ext import CommandHandler, Application, ContextTypes
 
async def callback_alarm(context: ContextTypes.DEFAULT_TYPE):
    # Beep the person who called this alarm:
    await context.bot.send_message(chat_id=context.job.chat_id, text=f'BEEP {context.job.data}!')
 
 
async def callback_timer(update: Update, context: ContextTypes.DEFAULT_TYPE):
    chat_id = update.message.chat_id
    name = update.effective_chat.full_name
    await context.bot.send_message(chat_id=chat_id, text='Setting a timer for 1 minute!')
    # Set the alarm:
    context.job_queue.run_once(callback_alarm, 60, data=name, chat_id=chat_id)
 
application = Application.builder().token('TOKEN').build()
timer_handler = CommandHandler('timer', callback_timer)
application.add_handler(timer_handler)
application.run_polling()

By placing the chat_id in the Job object, the callback function knows where it should send the message.

All good things must come to an end, so when you stop the Application, the related job queue will be stopped as well.

PTBs Persistence Setup currently does not support serialization of jobs. However, the current backend of the JobQueue, namely the APScheduler library has a mechanism for that, which you can leverage. Check out e.g. ptbcontrib/ptb_jobstores for an example implementation.