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What's Wrong?

Bug report: telegram plugin (claude-plugins-official) — frequent poller crashes, bun launch failures, and silent inbound drop

Filed: 2026-05-29 Reporter: Karl Zesewitz ([email protected]) Suggested venue: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues (marketplace owner = Anthropic, [email protected])

Environment

Summary

Since the most recent plugin refresh, the Telegram bridge is unstable in three distinct, independently reproducible ways. The user experience is: the plugin shows as connected in /mcp, but inbound messages do not arrive, and the poller process crashes — sometimes after a single message. Evidence is drawn from the plugin's own MCP logs across multiple working directories.

Bug 1 — MCP server fails to launch: Executable not found in $PATH: "bun" (15×)

Symptom. The MCP server intermittently fails to start; /mcp then shows the server failed/disconnected, and there is no poller at all → zero inbound.

Evidence (mcp-logs-plugin-telegram-telegram, cwd ~/DEV/Your OS):

"error":"Connection failed: Executable not found in $PATH: \"bun\""   ← 15 occurrences

Root cause. .mcp.json launches the server with the bare command "bun", relying on bun being on the spawned process's PATH. When Claude Code is started from a context whose PATH does not include ~/.bun/bin (launchd/cron agents, restricted login shells, GUI-launched sessions), the spawn fails outright. bun is installed and on PATH for interactive shells, which is why it works sometimes and not others — a classic PATH-dependent flake.

Expected. The server should launch deterministically regardless of the parent PATH.

Suggested fix. Resolve an absolute interpreter path (e.g. probe ~/.bun/bin/bun, /opt/homebrew/bin/bun, which bun at install time and pin it), or ship a small launcher shim that sources the user's bun path, or document a hard PATH requirement and fail with an actionable message instead of a bare "not found".

Bug 2 — Poller goes stale / crashes and orphans processes: replacing stale poller (28×)

Symptom. The polling process dies or goes stale (Karl reports: sometimes right after a single inbound message). A new session detects and replaces it, but the dead bun server.ts children are left orphaned (reparented to PID 1) and accumulate.

Evidence.

"Server stderr: telegram channel: replacing stale poller pid=27815"  (2026-05-07)
"... replacing stale poller pid=76540"  (2026-05-11)
"... replacing stale poller pid=6255"   (2026-05-14)
"... replacing stale poller pid=28428"  (2026-05-24)
   … 28 such events total across cwds (24 in ~/DEV/Your OS alone),
   recurring almost daily through 2026-05-29.

Direct process evidence (2026-05-29): 3 orphaned bun server.ts processes, parent PID = 1 (launchd), 1+ day old, holding no active Telegram connection, alongside the one live poller. The plugin's "replace stale poller" path recovers polling but does not reap the dead child.

Expected. A crashed/replaced poller should be terminated and reaped; no orphan accumulation.

Suggested fix. On "replacing stale poller", SIGTERM/SIGKILL the old PID and its bun subtree (and/or register a process.on('exit'/'SIGTERM') cleanup in server.ts). Investigate why the poller goes stale after a message — likely an unhandled rejection / dropped long-poll connection in the grammy getUpdates loop that exits the worker without exiting the process.

Bug 3 — "Connected" in /mcp but inbound is silently dropped (misleading status + debug-only log)

Symptom. /mcp reports the telegram server as connected/online (because the MCP tool transport — used for outbound reply — is up), yet inbound messages never reach the agent. There is no user-visible signal that inbound is being discarded.

Evidence.

"debug":"Channel notifications skipped: server plugin:telegram:telegram not in --channels list for this session"   ← 10× (debug level only)

Outbound reply works in the same session (confirmed: messages sent, Bot-API returned message IDs), which makes the asymmetry especially confusing — sending works, receiving silently does not.

Root cause (partly by design, but the UX is the bug). A session that did not pass --channels plugin:telegram@... has its inbound channel notifications dropped by the host gate. That requirement is reasonable, but: (a) it is only logged at debug, (b) /mcp still shows "connected", and (c) there is no warning anywhere the user looks. Net effect: the user sees "online" and reasonably concludes inbound should work.

Expected. When a telegram server is connected but the session is not subscribed via --channels, surface a visible warning (in /mcp status and/or at startup): "Telegram connected for outbound only — inbound disabled because this session was not started with --channels."

Suggested fix. Promote the "notifications skipped" condition from debug to a one-time visible warning, and annotate the server's /mcp status line with an "outbound-only / inbound-disabled" badge when the --channels subscription is missing.

Impact

A personal-assistant bridge that silently stops receiving messages — while reporting itself online — is worse than one that's visibly down: the user keeps messaging into a void. Combined with the PATH-flaky launch (Bug 1) and orphan-leaking crashes (Bug 2), the bridge cannot be relied on for always-on use, which is its core purpose.

Minimal repro

1. Start claude --channels plugin:telegram@claude-plugins-official from a GUI/launchd context whose PATH lacks ~/.bun/bin → Bug 1 (server fails to launch).
2. With a working poller, send several inbound messages over hours/days → Bug 2 (stale-poller replacement + orphaned bun processes; observe with pgrep -fl "bun server.ts" → parents at PID 1).
3. Start claude without --channels but with the plugin enabled; /mcp shows telegram connected; send an inbound message → never arrives (Bug 3). Outbound reply still works.

Attachments to include when filing

• ~/Library/Caches/claude-cli-nodejs/-Users-karl-DEV-Your-OS/mcp-logs-plugin-telegram-telegram/*.jsonl (redact bot token / chat IDs)
• Output of pgrep -fl "bun server.ts" and ps -o pid,ppid,etime -p <pids> showing orphans at PID 1

What Should Happen?

Plgin crasche after one or two inbound messages

Error Messages/Logs

is atteched written by claude code opus 4.8

Steps to Reproduce

see above

Claude Model

Opus

Is this a regression?

Yes, this worked in a previous version

Last Working Version

2.1.153

Claude Code Version

2.1.157

Platform

Anthropic API

Operating System

macOS

Terminal/Shell

Terminal.app (macOS)

Additional Information

No response