ream

/rim/ noun
a large quantity of written matter

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ream is a tool that lets you easily export all of your important Telegram chats.

It is a standalone re-implementation of Telegram Desktop's export functionality. The output from ream must be fully equivalent to the output from Telgram Desktop, and any difference in the resulting json (except for filenames) is treated as a bug.

Warning

ream is only meant to be used for downloading private chats.

Using it to export channels or groups may produce incomplete output or even get your account rate-limited.

Installation

• Install Poetry
• Clone this repository
• Run poetry install to get the dependencies

Configuration

First, you have to follow this instruction to obtain Telegram API credentials.

To run ream, you must create a configuration file named ream.toml with the following contents:

[api] # Your API credentials
app_id = 123456
app_hash = "abcdefg01234"

[export]
max_file_size = 5000000000 # Max size for files to be downloaded
chats = [ 123456, 7891234 ] # A list of chat ids to download
path = "exports" # A directory in which your chat exports will be saved

[ream]
log_level = "ERROR" # Optional: log level for the application, defaults to INFO

Running

poetry run ream.py

The first time you run the program, It'll ask you to enter your phone number and login code.

ream may throw an error after you log in. If that happens, you need to confirm the data export request that you got on your Telgram account, and try running ream again.

Incremental exports are supported, which means that ream will only export messages that aren't already present in the export.json file for a given chat. You can run ream as a scheduled job without having to deal with duplicate data.