It's hard to argue that Google Maps is an essential tool for searching places. It's also true that Waze is an amazing navigation app for driving. Unfortunately, there is no straightforward way to open Google Maps links with Waze and manual searching is often tedious, tricky and doesn't provide you with correct results.
The Google Maps to Waze Telegram bot is designed to solve this exact problem.
The bot is available at https://t.me/gmaps_2_waze_bot
It's available for anyone and completely free, try it out!
You can deploy your own bot if you like!
There are two types of deployment - polling and webhook, check the details below.
The most quick and basic setup.
Create a Telegram bot, copy .env.example to .env, set TELEGRAM_TOKEN, comment out everything else in the Webhook section.
Run docker compose up -d
That's it, the bot is ready to use!
As simple as it is, this type has one big drawback - the bot needs to constantly poll Telegram API for new messages to detect when something is sent. It means that around 99.99% of requests are wasted which is not a clean or efficient design.
The most efficient but advanced setup.
Requires a domain and open HTTP(S) ports to run the endpoint.
Create a Telegram bot, copy .env.example to .env, set all the environment variables accordingly.
Run docker compose -f docker-compose.https-endpoint.yml -f docker-compose.yml up -d
The solution leverages nginx-proxy and acme-companion sidecars to automatically configure Nginx and issue/renew SSL certificates for your (sub)domain, no manual actions are needed!
Then the bot will be publicly available at this secure endpoint and linked to the Telegram bot automatically.
This type is as efficient as possible as now Telegram sends all new messages to your endpoint and the bot does not need to constantly poll Telegram API to detect when something is sent.
If you want to test the Webhook deployment but don't have a domain or server, you can use free services like Serveo or Ngrok to expose your local server to the internet.