TDLight Telegram Bot API

TDLight Telegram Bot API is a fork of the official Telegram Bot API, focused on memory footprint and performance.

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 features
  • Added features
  • Modified features
• Installation
• Dependencies
• Usage
• Documentation
• Moving a bot to a local server
• Moving a bot from one local server to another
• License

TDLight features

Added features

TDLib replaced with TDLight

TDLight provides constant memory usage, unlike tdlib that must be restarted to reduce the heap size.

Command optimize_memory

Calling optimize_memory will remove old data from the in-memory cache and give the freed memory back to the os

Command getmessageinfo

Get information about a message

Parameters

• chat_id Message chat id
• message_id Message id

Returns message

Document the following methods:

Command 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

Command deletemessages

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

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.

Executable flag relative

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

Executable flag insecure

Allow http connection in non-local mode

Executable parameter max-batch-operations

maximum number of batch operations (default 10000)

Modified features

Command getchat

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

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)

Installation

The simplest way to build and install 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/tdlib/telegram-bot-api.git
cd telegram-bot-api
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
cmake --build . --target install

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)

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.