telegram-chat-forward

A simple script to forward all the messages of one chat (indivisual/group/channel) to another. Made using Telethon. Can be used to back up the contents of a chat to another place.

Signing in

First of all you need to have your Telegram account's api_id and api_hash. Learn how to get them.

Installation

Make sure you have python 3.6 or above installed, by running python --version.

The following commands are to be executed on a Mac/Linux terminal like bash or zsh. If you are a Windows user, then I strongly recommend using pythonanywhere or termux, unless you are familiar with using command line on Windows.

Changes may be required to be made in the following commands to make them Windows compatible.

• Clone this repo and move into it to get started.

git clone https://github.com/aahnik/telegram-chat-forward.git && cd telegram-chat-forward

• Install dependancies.

python3 -m venv venv && source venv/bin/activate
pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Note: It is recommended to use a virtual environment.

Setup

You must have the api_id and api_hash as environment variables. You may simply create a file named .env in the project directory and paste the following into it.

api_id=12345
api_hash=kjfjfk9r9JOIJOIjoijf9wr0w

Replace the above values with the actual values for your telegram account.

After this you need to create and fill up the config.ini file with your forwarding configurations.

Configuration

• The from and to in the config.ini has to be a username/phone/link/chat_id of the chat.
• The chat id is the best way for configurations. It will always be accurate. To get the chat id of a chat, forward any message of the chat to @userinfobot
• You may have as many as forwarding pairs as you wish. Make sure to give a unique header to each pair. Follow the syntax shown below.

[name of forward1]
; in the above line give any name as you wish
; the square brackets around the name should remain
from = https://t.me/someone
to = -1001235055711
offset = 0
; the offset will auto-update, keep it zero initially
[another name]
; the name of section must be unique
from = @username
to = @anothername
offset = 0
[forward saved messages]
; you can make a backup of your own saved messages (cloud storage)!
from = me
to = @anothername
offset = 0

Note:Any line starting with ; in a .ini file, is treated as a comment.

Offset

• When you run the script for the first time, keep offset=0.
• When the script runs, the value of offset in config.ini gets updated automatically.
• Offset is basically the id of the last message forwarded from from to to.
• When you run the script next time, the messages in from having an id greater than offset (newer messages) will be forwarded to to. That is why it is important not to loose the value of offset.

Execution

After setting up the config.ini, run the forwarder.py script.

python3 forwarder.py

You have to login for the first time using your phone number (inter-national format) and login code.

A session file called forwarder.session will be generated. Please don't delete this and make sure to keep this file secret.

Feel free to ask your questions in the Discussion section. For bugs and feature requests use the issues section of this repo.