⚠️ Deprecation Notice

The python-telegram-bot-raw library will no longer be updated after 21.3. Please instead use the python-telegram-bot library. The change requires no changes in your code and requires no additional dependencies. For additional information, please see this channel post.

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Introduction

This library provides a pure Python, asynchronous interface for the Telegram Bot API. It's compatible with Python versions 3.8+.

python-telegram-bot-raw is part of the python-telegram-bot ecosystem and provides the pure API functionality extracted from PTB. It therefore does not have independent release schedules, changelogs or documentation.

Note

Installing both python-telegram-bot and python-telegram-bot-raw in conjunction will result in undesired side-effects, so only install one of both.

Telegram API support

All types and methods of the Telegram Bot API 7.4 are supported.

Installing

You can install or upgrade python-telegram-bot via

$ pip install python-telegram-bot-raw --upgrade

To install a pre-release, use the --pre flag in addition.

You can also install python-telegram-bot-raw from source, though this is usually not necessary.

$ git clone https://github.com/python-telegram-bot/python-telegram-bot
$ cd python-telegram-bot
$ python setup_raw.py install

Note

Installing the .tar.gz archive available on PyPi directly via pip will not work as expected, as pip does not recognize that it should use setup_raw.py instead of setup.py.

Verifying Releases

We sign all the releases with a GPG key. The signatures are uploaded to both the GitHub releases page and the PyPI project and end with a suffix .asc. Please find the public keys here. The keys are named in the format -.gpg or -current.gpg if the key is currently being used for new releases.

In addition, the GitHub release page also contains the sha1 hashes of the release files in the files with the suffix .sha1.

This allows you to verify that a release file that you downloaded was indeed provided by the python-telegram-bot team.

Dependencies & Their Versions

python-telegram-bot tries to use as few 3rd party dependencies as possible. However, for some features using a 3rd party library is more sane than implementing the functionality again. As these features are optional, the corresponding 3rd party dependencies are not installed by default. Instead, they are listed as optional dependencies. This allows to avoid unnecessary dependency conflicts for users who don't need the optional features.

The only required dependency is httpx ~= 0.27 for telegram.request.HTTPXRequest, the default networking backend.

python-telegram-bot is most useful when used along with additional libraries. To minimize dependency conflicts, we try to be liberal in terms of version requirements on the (optional) dependencies. On the other hand, we have to ensure stability of python-telegram-bot, which is why we do apply version bounds. If you encounter dependency conflicts due to these bounds, feel free to reach out.

Optional Dependencies

PTB can be installed with optional dependencies:

• pip install "python-telegram-bot-raw[passport]" installs the cryptography>=39.0.1 library. Use this, if you want to use Telegram Passport related functionality.
• pip install "python-telegram-bot-raw[socks]" installs httpx[socks]. Use this, if you want to work behind a Socks5 server.
• pip install "python-telegram-bot-raw[http2]" installs httpx[http2]. Use this, if you want to use HTTP/2.

To install multiple optional dependencies, separate them by commas, e.g. pip install "python-telegram-bot-raw[passport,socks]".

Additionally, the shortcut pip install "python-telegram-bot-raw[all]" installs all optional dependencies.

Quick Start

Our Wiki contains an Introduction to the API explaining how the pure Bot API can be accessed via python-telegram-bot.

Resources

• The package documentation is the technical reference for python-telegram-bot. It contains descriptions of all available classes, modules, methods and arguments as well as the changelog.
• The wiki is home to number of more elaborate introductions of the different features of python-telegram-bot and other useful resources that go beyond the technical documentation.
• Our examples section contains several examples that showcase the different features of both the Bot API and python-telegram-bot. Even if it is not your approach for learning, please take a look at echobot.py. It is the de facto base for most of the bots out there. The code for these examples is released to the public domain, so you can start by grabbing the code and building on top of it.
• The official Telegram Bot API documentation is of course always worth a read.

Getting help

If the resources mentioned above don't answer your questions or simply overwhelm you, there are several ways of getting help.

1. We have a vibrant community of developers helping each other in our Telegram group. Join us! Asking a question here is often the quickest way to get a pointer in the right direction.
2. Ask questions by opening a discussion.
3. You can even ask for help on Stack Overflow using the python-telegram-bot tag.

Concurrency

Since v20.0, python-telegram-bot is built on top of Pythons asyncio module. Because asyncio is in general single-threaded, python-telegram-bot does currently not aim to be thread-safe.

Contributing

Contributions of all sizes are welcome. Please review our contribution guidelines to get started. You can also help by reporting bugs or feature requests.

Donating

Occasionally we are asked if we accept donations to support the development. While we appreciate the thought, maintaining PTB is our hobby, and we have almost no running costs for it. We therefore have nothing set up to accept donations. If you still want to donate, we kindly ask you to donate to another open source project/initiative of your choice instead.

License

You may copy, distribute and modify the software provided that modifications are described and licensed for free under LGPL-3. Derivatives works (including modifications or anything statically linked to the library) can only be redistributed under LGPL-3, but applications that use the library don't have to be.