Project Structure

Main interface

The library itself is under the telethon/ directory. The file there exposes the main TelegramClient, a class that servers as a nice interface with the most commonly used methods on Telegram such as sending messages, retrieving the message history, handling updates, etc.

The TelegramClient inherits from several mixing Method classes, since there are so many methods that having them in a single file would make maintenance painful (it was three thousand lines before this separation happened!). It’s a “god object”, but there is only a way to interact with Telegram really.

The TelegramBaseClient is an ABC which will support all of these mixins so they can work together nicely. It doesn’t even know how to invoke things because they need to be resolved with user information first (to work with input entities comfortably).

The client makes use of the network/ The MTProtoSender is responsible for connecting, reconnecting, packing, unpacking, sending and receiving items from the network. Basically, the low-level communication with Telegram, and handling MTProto-related functions and types such as BadSalt.

The sender makes use of a Connection class which knows the format in which outgoing messages should be sent (how to encode their length and their body, if they’re further encrypted).

Auto-generated code

The files under telethon_generator/ are used to generate the code that gets placed under telethon/tl/. The parsers take in files in a specific format (such as .tl for objects and .json for errors) and spit out the generated classes which represent, as Python classes, the request and types defined in the .tl file. It also constructs an index so that they can be imported easily.

Custom documentation can also be generated to easily navigate through the vast amount of items offered by the API.

If you clone the repository, you will have to run python gen in order to generate the code. Installing the library runs the generator too, but the mentioned command will just generate code.