Telegram Group Scraper

Scrape the full message history of any Telegram group or channel. Downloads messages, photos, files, and extracts all links into a clean markdown archive.

Setup

1. Get Telegram API credentials at my.telegram.org/apps

   • Log in with your phone number
   • Create an app (name doesn't matter)
   • Copy the api_id and api_hash

2. Install dependencies

   pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Configure credentials

   cp .env.example .env
   # Edit .env with your api_id and api_hash

4. First run -- you'll be prompted to log in with your phone number + code. This creates a session.session file so you only need to do this once.

Usage

# Interactive group picker (lists all your groups)
python scrape.py

# Scrape a specific group by name
python scrape.py "My Group Name"

# Text only, skip media downloads (much faster)
python scrape.py "My Group Name" --no-media

# Custom output directory
python scrape.py "My Group Name" -o ./my-export

# Limit to most recent N messages
python scrape.py "My Group Name" --limit 1000

Output

Everything goes into output/<group-slug>/:

output/my-group-name/
  messages.md    -- full message archive, organized by date
  links.md       -- every URL extracted, with sender + context
  photos/        -- all photos (named by date + message ID)
  files/         -- all documents, PDFs, videos, etc.

Features

• Full history scrape (all messages from day one)
• Auto-reconnect and retry on failures
• Resume support (skips already-downloaded media)
• Rate limit handling (respects Telegram's FloodWait)
• Sender name resolution with caching
• Link extraction from both message text and web previews
• Clean markdown output, easy to search/read