Quick start

Requirements

• Python >= 3.6

• Telethon (pinned in requirements.txt)

• Telegram API credentials — an API_ID and API_HASH from a registered Telegram application (my.telegram.org)

Install

pip install -r requirements.txt

The Telegram API credentials are read from the environment — never hard-code them into the script, which is public:

export API_ID=123456
export API_HASH=abc...

First dump

Point the dumper at a token. By default it walks message ids 1..∞ upwards in batches of 200, downloading every message, all media, and all user profile photos into a <bot_id>/ directory:

./dumper.py --token 12345678:ABCe2rPVteUWZ7wLeCqCb3CH3ilUY_fLabc

Note

For a busy bot the upward walk wastes time on long stretches of pruned (deleted/expired) old ids and can give up early. Dumping downwards from the latest message is far more productive — see Dumping modes.

Once you have a dump, browse it in the web viewer instead of reading raw text files.

Run ./dumper.py --help for the full flag list, or see Command-line options.