TDLight Telegram Bot API

The official documentation is here.

TDLight Telegram Bot API is an actively enhanced fork of the original Bot API, featuring experimental user support, proxies, unlimited files size, and more.

TDLight Telegram Bot API is 100% compatible with the official version.

The Telegram Bot API provides an HTTP API for creating Telegram Bots.

If you've got any questions about bots or would like to report an issue with your bot, kindly contact @BotSupport in Telegram.

If you've got any questions about our fork, instead, join @TDLightChat in Telegram, or see the news at @TDLight.

Please note that only TDLight-specific issues are suitable for this repository.

Table of Contents

• TDLight Bot API features
  • Added features
    • Added API Methods
    • Added Command Line Parameters
  • Modified features
  • User Mode
• Installation
• Dependencies
• Usage
• Documentation
• Moving a bot to a local server
• Moving a bot from one local server to another
• License

TDLight Bot API features

Added features

Method getMessageInfo

Get information about a message

Parameters

• chat_id Message chat id
• message_id Message id

Returns message

Document the following methods:

Method getParticipants

Get the member list of a supergroup or channel

Parameters

• chat_id Chat id
• filter String, possible values are members, parameters, admins, administators, restricted, banned, bots
• offset Number of users to skip
• limit The maximum number of users be returned; up to 200

Returns ChatMember

Parameters

• chat_id Chat id
• start First message id to delete
• end Last message id to delete

Returns true

Command ping

Send an MTProto ping message to the telegram servers. Useful to detect the delay of the bot api server.

Parameters

No parameters

Returns string

Ping delay in seconds represented as string.

Added Command Line Parameters

Flag --relative

If enabled, allow only relative paths for files in local mode.

Flag --insecure

Allow http connection in non-local mode

Flag --max-batch-operations=<number>

maximum number of batch operations (default 10000)

Executable parameter --stats-hide-sensible-data

Makes the stats page (if enabled) hide the bot token and the webhook url to no leak user secrets, when served publicly.

Existing Command Line Parameters

Which are not properly documented, so they are written down here.

Flag -v<number>/--verbose=<number>

Verbosity of logging. The loglevels are

• 0: Only fatal errors (least noisy)
• 1: All errors
• 2: Warnings, too
• 3: Infos
• 4: Debug output (very spammy)
• 1024: Also the stuff which is considered to "never" appear (as of writing there's no such stuff). For Docker containers, $TELEGRAM_VERBOSITY can be set.

Modified features

Method getChat

The command getChat will also try to resolve the username online, if it can't be found locally

Method deleteMessages

The command deleteMessages can also delete all the messages with message_id in range between start and end.
The start parameter MUST be less than the end parameter
Both start and end must be positive non-zero numbers
The method will always return true as a result, even if the messages cannot be deleted
This method does not work on private chat or normal groups It is not suggested to delete more than 200 messages per call

NOTE
The maximum number of messages to be deleted in a single batch is determined by the max-batch-operations parameter and is 10000 by default

Object Message

The Message object now has two new fields:

• views: how many views has the message (usually the views are shown only for channel messages)
• forwards: how many times the message has been forwarded

Object ChatMember

The ChatMember object now has two new fields:

• joined_date: integer, unix timestamp, when has the user joined
• inviter: User, the inviter

Object Chat

The Chat object now has two new fields:

• is_verified: bool, optional, default false. Is the chat verified by Telegram, clients show a verified batch
• is_scam: bool, optional, default false. Is the chat reported for scam, clients show a warning to the user

Object User

The User object now has two new fields:

• is_verified: bool, optional, default false. Is the user verified by Telegram, clients show a verified batch
• is_scam: bool, optional, default false. Is the user reported for scam, clients show a warning to the user

In addition, the member list now shows the full bot list (previously only the bot that executed the query was shown)

The bot will now receive Updates for all received media, even if a destruction timer is set.

User Mode

You can allow user accounts to access the bot api with the command-line option --allow-users or set the env variable TELEGRAM_ALLOW_USERS to 1 when using docker. User Mode is disabled by default, so only bots can access the api.

You can now log into the bot api with user accounts to create userbots running on your account.

Note: Never send your 2fa password over a plain http connection. Make sure https is enabled or use this api locally.

User Authorization Process

1. Send a request to {api_url}/userlogin

   Parameters:

   • phone_number: string. The phone number of your Telegram Account.

   Returns your user_token as string. You can use this just like a normal bot token on the /user endpoint

2. Send the received code to {api_url}/user{user_token}/authcode

   Parameters:

   • code: int. The code send to you by Telegram In-App or by SMS

   Will send {"ok": true, "result": true} on success.

3. Optional: Send your 2fa password to {api_url}/user{user_token}/2fapassword

   Parameters:

   • password: string. Password for 2fa authentication

   Will send {"ok": true, "result": true} on success.

4. Optional: Register the user by calling {api_url}/user{user_token}/registerUser.

   User registration is disabled by default. You can enable it with the --allow-users-registration command line option or the env variable TELEGRAM_ALLOW_USERS_REGISTRATION set to 1 when using docker.

   Parameters:

   • first_name: string. First name for the new account.
   • last_name: string, optional. Last name for the new account.

   Will send {"ok": true, "result": true} on success.

You are now logged in and can use all methods like in the bot api, just replace the /bot{bot_token}/ in your urls with /user{token}/.

You only need to authenticate once, the account will stay logged in. You can use the logOut method to log out or simply close the session in your account settings.

Some methods are (obviously) not available as a user. This includes:

• answerCallbackQuery
• setMyCommands
• editMessageReplyMarkup
• uploadStickerFile
• createNewStickerSet
• addStickerToSet
• setStickerPositionInSet
• deleteStickerFromSet
• setStickerSetThumb
• sendInvoice
• answerShippingQuery
• answerPreCheckoutQuery
• setPassportDataErrors
• sendGame
• setGameScore
• getGameHighscores

It is also not possible to attach a reply_markup to any message.

Your api wrapper may behave different in some cases, for examples command message-entities are not created in chats that don't contain any bots, so your Command Handler may not detect it.

It is possible to have multiple user-tokens to multiple client instances on the same bot api server.

Installation

The simplest way to use it is with this docker command:

docker run -p 8081:8081 --env TELEGRAM_API_ID=API_ID --env TELEGRAM_API_HASH=API_HASH tdlight/tdlightbotapi

The simplest way to build Telegram Bot API server is to use our Telegram Bot API server build instructions generator. If you do that, you'll only need to choose the target operating system to receive the complete build instructions.

In general, you need to install all Telegram Bot API server dependencies and compile the source code using CMake:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/tdlight-team/tdlight-telegram-bot-api
cd tdlight-telegram-bot-api
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
cmake --build . --target install

If you forgot that --recursive flag at the clone part, you can just navigate into that created folder and run

cd tdlight-telegram-bot-api
git submodule update --init --recursive

Dependencies

To build and run Telegram Bot API server you will need:

• OpenSSL
• zlib
• C++14 compatible compiler (e.g., Clang 3.4+, GCC 4.9+, MSVC 19.0+ (Visual Studio 2015+), Intel C++ Compiler 17+) (build only)
• gperf (build only)
• CMake (3.0.2+, build only)
• having it cloned with --recursive (see above) to get tdlib

Usage

Use telegram-bot-api --help to receive the list of all available options of the Telegram Bot API server.

The only mandatory options are --api-id and --api-hash. You must obtain your own api_id and api_hash as described in https://core.telegram.org/api/obtaining_api_id and specify them using the --api-id and --api-hash options or the TELEGRAM_API_ID and TELEGRAM_API_HASH environment variables.

To enable Bot API features not available at https://api.telegram.org, specify the option --local. In the local mode the Bot API server allows to:

• Download files without a size limit.
• Upload files up to 2000 MB.
• Upload files using their local path and the file URI scheme.
• Use an HTTP URL for the webhook.
• Use any local IP address for the webhook.
• Use any port for the webhook.
• Set max_webhook_connections up to 100000.
• Receive the absolute local path as a value of the file_path field without the need to download the file after a getFile request.

The Telegram Bot API server accepts only HTTP requests, so a TLS termination proxy needs to be used to handle remote HTTPS requests.

By default the Telegram Bot API server is launched on the port 8081, which can be changed using the option --http-port.

Documentation

See Bots: An introduction for developers for a brief description of Telegram Bots and their features.

See the Telegram Bot API documentation for a description of the Bot API interface and a complete list of available classes, methods and updates.

See the Telegram Bot API server build instructions generator for detailed instructions on how to build the Telegram Bot API server.

Subscribe to @BotNews to be the first to know about the latest updates and join the discussion in @BotTalk.

Moving a bot to a local server

To guarantee that your bot will receive all updates, you must deregister it with the https://api.telegram.org server by calling the method logOut. After the bot is logged out, you can replace the address to which the bot sends requests with the address of your local server and use it in the usual way. If the server is launched in --local mode, make sure that the bot can correctly handle absolute file paths in response to getFile requests.

Moving a bot from one local server to another

If the bot is logged in on more than one server simultaneously, there is no guarantee that it will receive all updates. To move a bot from one local server to another you can use the method logOut to log out on the old server before switching to the new one.

If you want to avoid losing updates between logging out on the old server and launching on the new server, you can remove the bot's webhook using the method deleteWebhook, then use the method close to close the bot instance. After the instance is closed, locate the bot's subdirectory in the working directory of the old server by the bot's user ID, move the subdirectory to the working directory of the new server and continue sending requests to the new server as usual.

License

Telegram Bot API server source code is licensed under the terms of the Boost Software License. See LICENSE_1_0.txt for more information.