grammY's bot.start() never returns

I run NanoClaw, an open-source personal Claude assistant, as a launchd service on my Mac. I moved its chat channel from WhatsApp to a Telegram bot built with grammY. One Node process runs the bot, a message loop, an IPC watcher, and a task scheduler.

After the switch, the log showed “Telegram message received” and the messages were in the database, but the bot never answered. The startup code looked like this:

await connectTelegram();   // calls await bot.start()
startMessageLoop();

In grammY, bot.start() starts long polling, and its promise resolves only when the bot stops. So startMessageLoop() never ran. Removing the await got replies working.

Three days later, chats worked but scheduled tasks didn’t run. A retry wrapper for 409 errors had been added in between, and it put an await bot.start(...) back in front of startSchedulerLoop(). The log had no “Scheduler loop started” line. This time I moved the other loops into grammY’s onStart callback, which runs once polling begins:

let started = false;
await bot.start({
  drop_pending_updates: true,
  onStart: () => {
    if (started) return;
    started = true;
    startSchedulerLoop();
    startIpcWatcher();
  },
});
// code here runs only after the bot stops

The started guard matters because of that retry wrapper. It calls start() again after a 409, and grammY calls onStart again each time, which would start a second scheduler.

The 409 itself was a separate problem:

GrammyError: Call to 'getUpdates' failed! (409: Conflict: terminated by other getUpdates request; make sure that only one bot instance is running)

Telegram allows only one long poll per bot. I was running npm run dev while the launchd service was polling too, and restarting the service while I also ran it by hand made more of them. Unloading the service before running the bot by hand stopped the 409s. Calling bot.stop() on SIGTERM and SIGINT, as the grammY docs show, lets the old poller end cleanly when launchd restarts it.