tdlight/README.md

TDLib

This repository contains the code of the Telegram Database library (TDLib).

Table of Content

• About
• Features
• License
• Dependencies
• Build with cmake
• Using TDLib in CMake C++ projects
• Using TDLib with other programming languages
• Installing dependencies
• Usage

About

TDLib is a cross-platform, fully functional Telegram client.

Features

TDLib has many advantages. Notably TDLib is:

• Cross-platform: TDLib can be used on Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux, Windows Phone, WebAssembly, watchOS, tvOS, Tizen, Cygwin. It should also work on other *nix systems with or without minimal effort.
• Multilanguage: TDLib can be easily used with any programming language that is able to execute C functions. Additionally it already has native bindings to Java (using JNI) and C# (using C++/CLI).
• Easy to use: TDLib takes care of all network implementation details, encryption and local data storage.
• High-performance: in the Telegram Bot API, each TDLib instance handles more than 18000 active bots simultaneously.
• Well-documented: all TDLib API methods and public interfaces are fully documented.
• Consistent: TDLib guarantees that all updates will be delivered in the right order.
• Reliable: TDLib remains stable on slow and unstable Internet connections.
• Secure: all local data is encrypted using a user-provided encryption key.
• Fully-asynchronous: requests to TDLib don't block each other or anything else, responses will be sent when they are available.

License

The Telegram Database library is licensed under the terms of the Boost Software License. See LICENSE for more information.

Build

Dependencies

TDLib depends on:

• C++14 compatible compiler (clang 3.4+, GCC 4.9+, MSVC 19.0+ (Visual Studio 2015+), Intel C++ Compiler 17+)
• OpenSSL
• zlib
• gperf
• CMake (3.0.2+)
• php (optional, for docs generation)
• doxygen (optional, for docs generation)

Build with CMake

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build .
cmake --build . --target install

Using TDLib in CMake C++ projects

For C++ projects that use CMake, the best approach is to build TDLib as part of your project.

There are several libraries that you could use in your CMake project:

• Td::TdJson, Td::TdJsonStatic — dynamic and static version of a json interface. Has a simple C interface, so it can be easily used with any language that supports C bindings.
• Td::TdStatic — static library with C++ interface.
• Td::TdCoreStatic — static library with low-level C++ interface intended mostly for internal usage.

For example, part of your CMakeList.txt may look like this:

add_subdirectory(td)
target_link_library(YourLibrary Td::TdJson)

Or you could install TDLib and then reference it in your CMakeLists.txt like this:

find_package(Td 1.0.5)
target_link_library(YourLibrary Td::TdJson)

See example/cpp/CMakeLists.txt.

Using TDLib from other languages

TDLib provides efficient native C++, Java, and C# (will be released soon) interfaces. But for most use cases we suggest to use the JSON interface. It can be easily used with any language that supports C bindinds. See example/python/tdjson_example.py for an example of such usage.

Installing dependencies

OS X

• Install the latest XCode command line tools.
• Install other dependencies, for example, using Homebrew:

brew install gperf cmake openssl

• After that you may need to manually specify path to the installed OpenSSL to CMake, e.g.,

cmake -DOPENSSL_ROOT_DIR=/usr/local/opt/openssl/ ..

Windows

• Download and install gperf. Add the path to gperf to the PATH variable.
• Install vcpkg.
• Run the following commands:

C:\src\vcpkg> .\vcpkg install openssl zlib

• Build TDLib with cmake as explained above, but instead of cmake .. use cmake -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=C:\src\vcpkg\scripts\buildsystems\vcpkg.cmake ...

Linux

Install all dependencies using your package manager.

TDLib usage

Take a look at our examples and documentation.