Telegram-Purple Unofficial (Beta)

Telegram-purple is a Libpurple protocol plugin that adds support for the Telegram messenger.

I keep getting many questions about this plugin in my E-mail, so I've created a telegram group chat for telegram-purple related discussions or questions.

Installation

If you are just interested in using the plugin you probably want to use one of the following binary distributions. Please note that I do not control most of those package sources and the version may lag behind.

If your platform is not supported or you want to contribute by testing or development, scroll down to "Building form Source".

OSX (Adium)

1. Download and execute the [Telegram-Adium bundle] (https://github.com/majn/telegram-purple/releases/download/v1.2.6/telegram-adium-1.2.6.AdiumLibpurplePlugin.zip)
2. Restart Adium

Windows

Eion Robb provides a binary for Windows users:

1. Download and execute the setup from http://eion.robbmob.com/telegram/
2. Restart Pidgin

Fedora (22, 23)

The package is available in the Fedora 22 and 23 testing repositories:

 dnf config-manager --set-enabled updates-testing
 dnf install purple-telegram

Arch Linux (AUR)

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/telegram-purple/

Debian

At the time of writing, the package hasn't been accepted yet. Please first check if it's already available to you: sudo apt-get install telegram-purple

If this doesn't work because the package doesn't exist (yet), please build it from source.

Building From Source

Below, you will find the instructions for how to build the libpurple protocol plugin from source.

1. Clone

This repository has submodules, so you need to clone recursively.

    git clone --recursive https://github.com/majn/telegram-purple
    cd telegram-purple

1b. Cloning if you're a packager

If you are unsure about whether you need this, then you are not a packager and don't have any use for this.

If you need an "orig-tarball", it can be generated by make dist. Note that this automatically generates an appropriate version number like 1.2.4-58-g8e3cebf. You can truncate the git suffix (-g8e3cebf). If the -58 part exists, it means that you're using a development version, which is probably not what you want. If you still want to package this, please leave the commit number (i.e., 58) intact, as this indicates that this version is in fact much further than just 1.2.4.

2. Fetch all dependencies

Fedora

    sudo dnf install gcc gettext libgcrypt-devel libwebp-devel libpurple-devel zlib-devel

Debian / Ubuntu

We are working on a Debian package! Please first check if it's already available to you: sudo apt-get install telegram-purple

If the above works, then you should stop here: It is now installed.

If the above fails: Don't worry, just continue building it by yourself. Next you need to install these dependencies:

    sudo apt-get install libgcrypt20-dev libpurple-dev libwebp-dev gettext

OpenSUSE

    sudo zypper install gcc glib glib-devel libpurple libpurple-devel zlib-devel libwebp-devel

And the development files for gcrypt, probably gcrypt-devel or something. (FIXME)

3. Compile and install

If libwebp is not available, you can disable sticker support by calling ./configure --disable-libweb instead. Please note that this is usually not necessary.

    ./configure
    make
    sudo make install

Pulling Updates

This repository contains submodules, and a simple pull just won't be enough to update all the submodules’ files. Pull new changes with:

    git pull
    git submodule sync # just in case the configuration has changed 
    git submodule update --recursive

Usage

First Login

The username is your current phone number, including your full country prefix. For Germany, this would be '+49', resulting in a user name like '+49151123456'. Telegram will verify your phone number by sending you a code via SMS. You will be prompted for this code, once that happens.

Buddy List

Like in the official Telegram apps, the displayed buddy list consists of all active conversations.

Foreign Users

Foreign users, like for example people you only know through a group chat but never had any conversation with, will not be part of your buddy list by default. You can add those users to the buddy list by clicking on "Add contact..." in the users context menu.

Using secret chats

You can use Telegram secret chats with this plugin, they will show up as a new buddy with a '!' in front of the buddy name.

One caveat of secret chats in Telegram is that they can only have one endpoint, this is a limitation of the protocol. This means that if you create a secret chat in Pidgin you will not be able to use that chat on your phone. You will be asked whether to accept each secret chat, so you can always choose to accept the chat on a different device if you want. You can set a default behavior for dealing with secret chats (Accept or Decline) in the account settings, if you don't want that prompt to appear every time.

Self destructive messages will be ignored, since I don't know any way to delete them from the conversation and the history.

Confirming the key authenticity

Click on the buddy in the buddy list and click on "Show Info" to visualize the key fingerprint.

Initiate secret chats

To initiate a secret chat from Pidgin, click on a Buddy in the Buddy List and hit "Start Secret Chat"

Deleting secret chats

If you delete a secret chat from the buddy list, it will be terminated and no longer be usable.

Unicode Emojis for Pidgin

The Telegram phone applications for iOS and Android make use of standardized Unicode smileys (called Emojis). Pidgin does not display those smileys natively, but you can install a custom smiley theme like (https://github.com/stv0g/unicode-emoji) or (https://github.com/VxJasonxV/emoji-for-pidgin) and activate it under Settings > Themes > Smiley Theme.

Code-Tags

Since 1.3.0 it is possible to write messages in monospaced fonts using the markdown backtick syntax.

Example

``` if (true) {
    // do smth 
}```

Result

if (true) {
    // do smth
}

Building the Adium Plugin

Compiling with XCode is a little bit problematic, since it requires you to compile Adium first to get the necessary framework files. My advice is to just use the prebuilt bundle, but if you really want to do it, follow these steps:

1. Get the Adium source, compile it with XCode and copy the build output into telegram-adium/Frameworks/Adium. It should contain at least Adium.framework, AdiumLibpurple.framework and AIUitilies.framework

2. Open the Adium source code, go to ./Frameworks and copy libglib.framework and libpurple.framework into telegram-adium/Frameworks/Adium

3. Build the tgl submodule and delete libtgl.so from libs/ (it should only contain libtgl.a)

4. Install libwebp, libgcrypt and gnupg with homebrew:

   brew install webp brew install libgcrypt libgpg-error

5. If you already downloaded libwebp/libgcrypt in previous builds make sure that the binaries are up-to-date

   brew update brew upgrade webp libgcrypt

6. Install with homebrew and move it into the appropriate directory so that XCode can find them. Note that the versions might differ, use the one that is

   mkdir -p ./telegram-adium/Frameworks/Adium cp /usr/local/Cellar/webp/0.4.3/lib/libwebp.a ./telegram-adium/Frameworks cp /usr/local/Cellar/libgcrypt/1.6.4/lib/libgcrypt.20.dylib ./telegram-adium/Frameworks/Adium cp /usr/local/Cellar/libgpg-error/1.20_1/lib/libgpg-error.0.dylib ./telegram-adium/Frameworks/Adium

7. Update the paths in the dylibs, to assure that the resulting binary will load them form within the bundle.

   cd ./telegram-adium/Frameworks/Adium install_name_tool -id "@loader_path/../Resources/libgcrypt.20.dylib" ./libgcrypt.20.dylib install_name_tool -id "@loader_path/../Resources/libgpg-error.0.dylib" ./libgpg-error.0.dylib install_name_tool -change "/usr/local/lib/libgpg-error.0.dylib" "@loader_path/../Resources/libgpg-error.0.dylib" ./libgcrypt.20.dylib

8. Build the XCode-Project and execute the created bundle

Building the Debian Package

If you just need a .deb, simply do:

sudo apt-get install debhelper
git checkout debian-master
git submodule update --recursive
fakeroot ./debian/rules binary

And you're done! The .deb is in the directory at which you started. To show some info about it, try this:

dpkg --info telegram-purple_*.deb

debian-master always points to a version that was submitted to Debian. (Note that this doesn't exist yet, as we haven't released to Debian yet.) debian-develop is the candidate for the next submission.

Debian Maintainers

If you're a maintainer (if you're not sure, then you aren't a maintainer), you need to produce a lot more files than that.

Here's how you can generate a .orig.tar.gz:

make dist

Note that these are incompatible with the old debian/genorigtar.sh tarballs, and can't be made compatible easily. If you need the tarball from "back then", see the documentation there.

This command requires the original tar to exist (and will fail otherwise, although the error message will be misleading) will build all further files, specifically .debian.tar.xz, .dsc, .deb, and .changes:

dpkg-buildpackage

For the upload, you should use pbuilder and similar to build the package in a more minimalistic environment. That covers the official part of the work-flow.

Of course, you can call small parts of the build process directly, in order to avoid overhead like rebuilding. For example, if you only need the .debian.tar.xz and .dsc files, do this:

make dist
false # Move tar to parent directory, by hand
dpkg-source -b .

1.3.0

• channel/supergroup support
• support sending code tags in markdown "backtick" format (see README for example)
• reduce amount of file-transfer popups in Pidgin, auto-load media in the background
• fix stability issues for the win32 build
• fix multiple crashes in libtgl

Discussion / Help

Custom pubkeys

As we want to avoid OpenSSL, it has become necessary to replace the PEM file format. This means that if you use a custom pubkey (which you really REALLY shouldn't be doing), you have to adapt, sorry.

We no longer ship tg-server.pub (old format), but instead tg-server.tglpub (new format). If you have a .pub and want to continue using telegram-purple, please use this (hopefully highly portable) tool: pem2bignum

You can also write your own conversion tool if you prefer. The format is really simple:

1. e, the public exponent, encoded as big endian 32 bit fixed length (e.g. 0x00 01 00 01 for 65537)
2. n_len, the length of n in bytes, encoded as big endian 32 bit fixed length (e.g. 0x00 00 01 00 for a 2048-bit = 256-byte key)
3. n_raw, the raw modulus, encoded as big endian, using the previously indicated length (e.g. 0xC1 50 02 3E [248 bytes omitted] 21 79 25 1F in the case of telegram's public RSA key.)

If you are interested in developing a non-OpenSSL-licensed converter, look into insane-triangle-banana.

FAQ

• I receive pictures in a chat, but they aren't showing up
  • A: Make sure that you don't have a plugin like "Conversation Colors" that strips HTML from messages and removes the pictures.

Group chat

Telegram group chat for telegram-purple or libtgl related discussions or questions:

- https://goo.gl/QHttTR

Submitting Bug Reports

IMPORTANT: if you report bugs PLEASE make sure to always include as much information as possible. This should always include at least the telegram-purple version and (if possible) commit, where you got telegram-purple from (Source build, package repository, etc.), the Pidgin version (if you use a different messenger please state that too!) and your OS Version.

If you describe some issue please be as precise as possible. Descriptions like "XY doesn't work" will not help me. Describe what you are doing what kind of issue you are experiencing: "If I click on X, Y happens, but instead I would expect Z to happen".

For error reports please include the application logs. To get Pidgin to print a log, start it from command line, specifying the -d option. ATTENTION: This log will contain personal information like your phone number, message content or contact or chat names. If you plan on uploading it somewhere public mask those entries in the log.

Bug reports regarding crashes should include a backtrace if possible, there is extended documentation available on how to get a backtrace for crashes

Empathy / libtelepathy

Empathy doesn't natively support libpurple plugins since its based on libtelepathy, but there is a compatibillity layer called telepathy-haze that can be used to execute libpurple plugins. This means that you can basically run this plugin thanks to telepathy-haze but you will usually get less features and worse usability compared to real libpurple clients. If you use Empathy (or anything else based on libtelepathy) I recommend telepathy-morse which is a connection manager written specifically for your messenger.

Authors

Telegram-Purple was written by:

- Matthias Jentsch <[email protected]>
- Vitaly Valtman
- Ben Wiederhake <[email protected]>
- Christopher Althaus <[email protected]>

Acknowledgements

This software is based on the library Libtgl, which was written by Vitaly Valtman [email protected] and others, see (https://github.com/vysheng/tgl/)