telegram-export

A tool to download Telegram data (users, chats, messages, and media) into a database (and display the saved data).

Database schema:

What does it do? Is it a bot?

No, it's not really a bot. It uses the Telegram API (what Telegram apps use), so it has access to everything a Telegram app can do. This is why you need an API ID and API hash to use it, and why one from Telegram Desktop will work. Since normal clients need to download messages, media, users etc to display them in-app, telegram-export can do the same, and save them into a nice database.

Preperations for Ubuntu 16.04

Python

sudo apt-get install python3

sudo apt-get install python-pip3

sudo pip --upgrade pip

Docker

See https://docs.docker.com/install/linux/docker-ce/ubuntu/#upgrade-docker-ce

Installation

The simplest way is to run sudo pip3 install --upgrade telegram_export, after which telegram-export should simply be available as a command: telegram-export in the terminal.

Usage

First, copy config.ini.example (from GitHub) to ~/.config/telegram-export/config.ini and edit some values. You'll probably need to create this folder. To write your config whitelist, you may want to refer to the output of telegram-export --list-dialogs to get dialog IDs or telegram-export --search <query> to filter the results.

Then run telegram-export and allow it to dump data.

Full option listing:

usage: __main__.py [-h] [--list-dialogs] [--search-dialogs SEARCH_STRING]
                   [--config-file CONFIG_FILE] [--contexts CONTEXTS]
                   [--format {text,html}] [--download-past-media]

Download Telegram data (users, chats, messages, and media) into a database
(and display the saved data)

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --list-dialogs        list dialogs and exit
  --search-dialogs SEARCH_STRING
                        like --list-dialogs but searches for a dialog by
                        name/username/phone
  --config-file CONFIG_FILE
                        specify a config file. Default config.ini
  --contexts CONTEXTS   list of contexts to act on eg --contexts=12345,
                        @username (see example config whitelist for full
                        rules). Overrides whitelist/blacklist.
  --format {text,html}  formats the dumped messages with the specified
                        formatter and exits.
  --download-past-media
                        download past media instead of dumping new data (files
                        that were seen before but not downloaded).

Limitations

• Still being worked on. It dumps things, but the schema may change and we won't support old schema transitions.
• Relies on Telethon <https://github.com/LonamiWebs/Telethon>, which is still pre-1.0.
• Certain information is not dumped for simplicity's sake. For example, edited messages won't be re-downloaded and there is currently no support for multiple versions of a message in the db. However, this shouldn't be much of an issue, since most edits or deletions are legit and often to fix typos.

Installation from source

git clone this repository, then python3 setup.py install. You should also read through the Installation section for related notes.