Local Telegram Long Polling in PHP Without Replaying Failed Updates

Developers building Telegram bots locally often find that public webhooks via tunnels like ngrok add friction during rapid iteration. Long polling with the getUpdates endpoint offers a practical alternative, letting a local PHP CLI script fetch updates directly from Telegram. Naive PHP implementations, however, can freeze from cURL timeout mismatches, drop updates during crashes, or repeatedly reprocess the same batch after an exception. This is especially risky when handlers cause side effects such as database writes, payments, or API calls. The guide explains how to build a resilient polling loop that handles timeouts, advances update offsets correctly, and avoids duplicate processing after local failures.