When developing a Telegram bot locally—such as a notification service or order collection tool—setting up a public HTTPS webhook endpoint with local tunnels like ngrok can introduce unnecessary friction during rapid iteration. Long polling using Telegram's getUpdates endpoint is the standard alternative for local development. It allows a CLI PHP script running on localhost to pull updates directly from Telegram's servers.

However, naive implementations of long polling in PHP frequently fail in subtle, destructive ways. Developers often run into issue loops where the script freezes due to cURL timeout mismatches, drops updates during crashes, or continuously re-executes the exact same batch of updates after an unhandled exception.…