TDLib

TDLib (Telegram Database library) is a cross-platform library for building Telegram clients. It can be easily used from almost any programming language.

Table of Contents

• Features
• Examples and documentation
• Dependencies
• Building
• Installing dependencies
• Using in CMake C++ projects
• Using in Java projects
• Using with other programming languages
• License

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 are 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 are sent when they are available.

Examples and documentation

Take a look at our examples and documentation.

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 (build only)
• CMake (3.0.2+, build only)
• PHP (optional, for docs generation)
• Doxygen (optional, for docs generation)

Building

Install all TDLib dependencies as described in Installing dependencies. Then enter directory containing TDLib sources and compile them using CMake:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
cmake --build .

Installing dependencies

OS X

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

brew install gperf cmake openssl

• Build TDLib with CMake as explained in building. You may need to manually specify path to the installed OpenSSL to CMake, e.g.,

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

Windows

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

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

• Build TDLib with CMake as explained in building, but instead of cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release .. use cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=C:\src\vcpkg\scripts\buildsystems\vcpkg.cmake ...

Linux

• Install all dependencies using your package manager.

Using in CMake C++ projects

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

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 programming 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 CMakeLists.txt may look like this:

add_subdirectory(td)
target_link_libraries(YourTarget PRIVATE Td::TdStatic)

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

find_package(Td 1.0.5 REQUIRED)
target_link_libraries(YourTarget PRIVATE Td::TdStatic)

See example/cpp/CMakeLists.txt.

Using in Java projects

TDLib provides native Java interface through JNI.

See example/java for example of using TDLib from Java and detailed build and usage instructions.

Using from other programming 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.

License

The TDLib is licensed under the terms of the Boost Software License. See LICENSE_1_0.txt for more information.