Telegram CLI

A simple, fast, and powerful command-line tool written in Rust to interact with the Telegram Bot API. This tool allows you to send messages, files, photos, videos, and audio directly from your terminal.

Features

• Send text messages, documents, photos, videos, and audio.
• Supports glob patterns for sending multiple files at once.
• Read message content from standard input.
• Format messages with Markdown or HTML.
• Wrap messages in code blocks with syntax highlighting.
• Configure default bot token and chat ID in a config.json file under ~/.config/telegram-cli/.
• Configure the prefix and postfix to automatically add to your text messages.
• Overrides for bot token and chat ID via command-line options.
• Available as a Nix package and flake for easy installation on NixOS and other systems.
• Includes a home-manager module for declarative configuration.

Installation

With Nix

For users of the Nix package manager, you can install telegram-cli declaratively.

Via Flakes:

1. Add the flake to your flake.nix inputs:

   {
     description = "My NixOS configuration";
     inputs = {
       nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable";
       telegram-cli = {
         url = "github:1ffycat/telegram-cli";
         inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";
       };
     };
     # ...
   }
   

2. Add it to your environment.systemPackages in your configuration.nix:

   environment.systemPackages = [
     inputs.telegram-cli.packages.${system}.telegram-cli
   ];
   

home-manager Module:

The flake also exposes a home-manager module for more granular, user-level configuration.

1. Import the module in your home.nix:

   { inputs, ... }: {
     imports = [
       inputs.telegram-cli.homeManagerModules.default
     ];
   }
   

2. Configure the program:

   programs.telegram-cli = {
     enable = true;
     botToken = "<your-telegram-bot-token>";      # Optional: Default bot token
     defaultChatId = "<your-telegram-chat-id>";   # Optional: Default chat ID
     prefix = "NixOS Alert:\n";                   # Optional: Prefix for text messages
     postfix = "\n-- Sent from my NixOS machine"; # Optional: Postfix for text messages
     defaultFormat = "MarkdownV2";                # Optional: "Html", "MarkdownV2", or "No". Defaults to "MarkdownV2".
   };
   

Usage

telegram-cli [OPTIONS] [MESSAGE]

Arguments

• [MESSAGE] The message to send. This can also be piped from stdin when using the -s flag.

Options

Examples

Sending a simple text message:

telegram-cli "Hello, world!"

Sending a message with Markdown formatting:

telegram-cli --format md "This is a *bold* and _italic_ message."

Piping a message from another command:

echo "This message comes from stdin" | telegram-cli -s

Sending a file:

telegram-cli -f ./my-document.pdf "Here is the document you requested."

Sending multiple photos using a glob pattern:

telegram-cli -p "images/*.jpg" "A collection of beautiful photos."

Sending a code snippet:

telegram-cli -c rust 'fn main() { println!("Hello from Rust!"); }'

Using a different bot token and chat ID:

telegram-cli --bot-token "YOUR_OTHER_BOT_TOKEN" --chat-id "ANOTHER_CHAT_ID" "Message to a different chat."

License

This project is licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL-2.0).

This license is a "weak copyleft" license. It requires that any modifications to MPL-licensed source code files must also be licensed under the MPL-2.0. However, it allows you to combine the MPL-licensed code with code under other licenses (including proprietary ones) in a larger work.

A full copy of the license is available in the ./LICENSE file in this repository.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request.