Jtdylktuy

Since Telegram is an infinite cloud service, I use it as a secondary backup location. I would like to automate this so that I don't have to remember to do it every month (in the last two years I missed about every second monthly backup).

But I can't find a way to automate any Telegram client without click macros (I would like to have it run silently in the background):

• 
  ./Telegram --help does nothing except opening the program.


• I wasn't successful in determining where the argv variable goes from the main method, so I don't know if there even are console arguments.


• Bots can't access my file system (and that's a good thing).

I can easily automate packing the files I want into 1.5GB archives using 7z, but I have no idea about how to actually send them. Is there a way to do it without click macros?

I'm on Debian 9.5 and using the official Linux client from telegram.org.

I found a solution! The official client probably doesn't allow it (all known command line arguments are unofficially documented here), but for Linux and Mac (and probably also Linux subsystem on Windows), there is an unofficial command line interface for Telegram called "tg": https://github.com/vysheng/tg

It doesn't mention in its description that it can also send files, but in a Github issue someone wrote that there is the send_file function. In general it's not too well documented, but calling it with --help and entering help inside the program gives a lot of info, the rest can be figured out by fiddling with the parameters and trying different things.

This is the solution I came up with that way:

Preparation

• Install tg like the readme file says. It didn't work rightaway for me on Debian due to a bug, but as said in this bug report comment, installing libssl1.0-dev is a workaround for that bug: Execute sudo apt install libssl1.0-dev between ./configure and make.


• Log in with your Telegram account: bin/telegram-cli to start the interactive program, enter phone number, enter login code. I entered my phone number starting with +49 and that worked, maybe it's required, I don't know.


• Now use another Telegram client to send a message in the target chat (or alternatively receive a message there). That adds the chat's name to the program's internal chat list. If multiple chats with the same name exist, it seems to pick the most recently added one. I have not found a way to message a chat by ID.
  
  That's it for the setup, quit exits the program.

Uploading files programmatically

Now files can be uploaded by giving a send_file command to the program with --execute, which makes it execute that command and then quit automatically:

/path/to/tg/bin/telegram-cli --exec 'send_file <chat> <filename>'

<chat> is the chat's name.
<filename> is the path to the file.
/path/to/tg should be obvious.

Example usage

I'll use something like this to upload a backup of my Google Drive folder to Telegram after I've created it with p7zip:

for filename in ~/drive_backup/drive.zip.*; do ~/tg/bin/telegram-cli --exec 'send_file Backup_chat '"$filename"; done

This uploads all files whose names start with "drive.zip." (.001, .002 etc.) in the folder ~/drive_backup to the Telegram chat "Backup_chat".