telegramfs

Overview ¶

Command telegramfs is a 9P file server for Telegram.

This program requires cgo and tdlib, see bindings.go:/tdjson/.

Telegramfs looks for a configuration file at "$HOME/lib/telegramfs/config". It is in JSON format and is described in config.go. An alternative configuration file can be specified with the -config command line flag. The configuration file must contain, in particular, API id and hash, so you should create those in Telegram first.

Telegramfs serves a 9P file server listening at the configured address (see config.go). You most likely want to use localhost!

The file system has a directory per chat named as the contact/chat name, converted to snake-case.

Within each such directory, is a file per message, whose name is a unix timestamp with a ".txt" extension.

When a message file is read, the message is marked read in Telegram.

An additional file called "in" within each chat directory sends each series of writes as a message (that means, the message is sent when the file is closed, not as content is written to it).

Chats, messages, and users are all persisted across restarts in a Bolt database stored at "$HOME/lib/telegramfs/history.bolt". Logs are stored in "$HOME/lib/telegramfs/log".

The first time the command is run it will prompt Telegram to send you an authorization code. You then run the command again using the -code flag to pass the code. Subsequent invocations of the command do not need -code.

You probably won't read message files one by one, but you can craft a helper script for that. Here's mine, for example:

#!/usr/local/plan9/bin/rc
. 9.rc
# Reconstruct a Telegram thread via its file system.
fn messages {
	limit = $1
	ls | grep '[0-9]+\.txt' | sed 's/\.txt//g' | tail -n $limit
}
for (m in `{messages 10}) {
	echo -n @ $m^' '
	cat $m^.txt
	echo
}

Alternatively, each chat directory contains an "out" file that contains all messages for that chat. Therefore, another approach is to just

cat my-contact/out

and write to the "in" file in the same "my-contact" directory whenever you need to send a message to the chat. (No need to use "tail -f", because reads will block until a new message arrives.)

The script I use for chatting uses this latter approach, see telechat included in this repo.