telegram-send
Telegram-send is a command-line tool to send messages and files over Telegram to your account, to a group or to a channel. It provides a simple interface that can be easily called from other programs.
Table of Contents
Usage
To send a message:
telegram-send "hello, world"
There is a maximum message length of 4096 characters, larger messages will be automatically split up into smaller ones and sent separately.
To send a message using Markdown or HTML formatting:
telegram-send --format markdown "Only the *bold* use _italics_"
telegram-send --format html "<pre>fixed-width messages</pre> are <i>also</i> supported"
For more information on supported formatting, see the formatting documentation.
To send a file (maximum file size of 50 MB):
telegram-send --file document.pdf
To send an image with an optional caption (maximum file size of 10 MB):
telegram-send --image photo.jpg --caption "The Moon at night"
Telegram-send integrates into your file manager (Thunar, Nautilus and Nemo):
Install
Install telegram-send system-wide with pip:
sudo pip3 install telegram-send
Or if you want to install it for a single user (recommended):
pip3 install telegram-send
If installed for a single user you need to add ~/.local/bin to their path:
echo 'PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.profile
(This will be in effect on the next login, do a . ~/.profile for the
impatient.)
And finally configure it with telegram-send --configure if you want to send to
your account, telegram-send --configure-group to send to a group or with
telegram-send --configure-channel to send to a channel.
Use the --config option to use multiple configurations. For example to set up
sending to a channel in a non-default configuration: telegram-send --config
channel.conf --configure-channel. Then always specify the config file to use
it: telegram-send --config channel.conf "hello".
Examples
Here are some examples to get a taste of what is possible with telegram-send.
alert on completion of shell commands
Receive an alert when long-running commands finish with the tg alias, based on
Ubuntu's built-in alert. Put the following in your ~/.bashrc:
alias tg='telegram-send "$([ $? = 0 ] && echo "" || echo "error: ") $(history|tail -n1|sed -e '\''s/^\s*[0-9]\+\s*//;s/[;&|]\s*tg$//'\'')"'
And then use it like sleep 10; tg. This will send you a message with the
completed command, in this case sleep 10.
What if you started a program and forgot to set the alert? Suspend the program
with Ctrl+Z and then enter fg; telegram-send "your message here".
To automatically receive notifications for long running commands, use ntfy with the Telegram backend.
periodic messages with cron
We can combine telegram-send with cron to periodically send messages. Here we will set up a cron job to send the Astronomy Picture of the Day to the astropod channel.
Create a bot by talking to the BotFather, create a public channel and add
your bot as administrator to the channel. You will need to explicitly search for
your bot's username when adding it. Then run telegram-send --configure-channel
--config astropod.conf. We will use the apod.py script that gets the daily
picture and calls telegram-send to post it to the channel.
We create a cron job /etc/cron.d/astropod (as root) with the content:
SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
# m h dom mon dow user command
0 1 * * * telegram ~/apod.py --config ~/astropod.conf
Make sure the file ends with a newline. Cron will then execute the script every
day at 1:00 as the user telegram. Join the astropod channel to see the
result.
Supervisor process state notifications
Supervisor controls and monitors processes. It can start processes at boot,
restart them if they fail and also report on their status. Supervisor-alert
is a simple plugin for Supervisor that sends messages on process state updates
to an arbitrary program. Using it with telegram-send (by using the --telegram
option), you can receive notifications whenever one of your processes exits.
Usage from Python
Because telegram-send is written in Python, you can use its functionality
directly from other Python programs: import telegram_send. Look at
the documentation.
Questions & Answers
How to use a proxy?
You can set a proxy with an environment variable:
https_proxy=https://ip:port telegram-send "hello"
Within Python you can set the environment variable with:
os.environ["https_proxy"] = "https://ip:port"
If you have a SOCKS proxy, you need to install support for it:
pip3 install pysocks
If you installed telegram-send with sudo, you also need to install pysocks
with sudo.
Uninstall
sudo telegram-send --clean
sudo pip3 uninstall telegram-send
Or if you installed it for a single user:
telegram-send --clean
pip3 uninstall telegram-send