telegram-dl is a little script for retrieving content on Telegram.

Usage: telegram-dl.py URL [URL...]

All URLs must be messages in the same channel. The output consists of writing each message to a file {channelName}_{messageId}.json. If the message has any attachment (photo, video, file, etc.), it gets downloaded as well. The filename for that is chosen by Telethon; if it’s a file attachment, the literal path as presented by Telegram is used, and if it’s a photo or video, a name is made up.

The only dependency of the script is Telethon (though you probably want cryptg for performance reasons). For authentication (always required), specify the TELEGRAM_API_ID, TELEGRAM_API_HASH, and TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN environment variables. The session is stored in a file telegram-dl.session; keeping this between executions is not critical but recommended.

A Dockerfile is provided for running with Docker. Simply provide the URL(s) as arguments on running the image. Data is written to the /data volume, which you may want to mount from the host machine instead.

docker build -t telegram-dl:latest .
docker run --rm -v "$(pwd)"/data:/data -e TELEGRAM_API_ID=... -e TELEGRAM_API_HASH=... -e TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN=... telegram-dl https://t.me/telegram/178