A clean selfbot for Telegram with an emphasis on quality and practicality.

Pyrobud is designed to complement the official clients, rather than replacing them as many other selfbots tend to lean towards. It is written in Python using the Telethon library.

A working installation of Python 3.6 or newer is required to run Pyrobud.

Pyrobud should be compatible with all major operating systems. While it has not been officially tested on Windows or macOS, there should not be anything preventing it from working on those platforms. Please let me know if you've gotten it working so I can add it here.

It is also possible to run the bot on a smartphone. On Android it can be done with the Termux app, and on iOS it should be possible using the iSH app. Note that I have only tested the Android solution, so try it on iOS at your own risk.

I do not endorse abuse of free cloud web hosting services (such as Heroku) to run the bot. Please do not ask me for assistance with such endeavors — you are on your own if you insist on running the bot that way.

Simply run docker run --rm -v "$PWD/data:/data" kdrag0n/pyrobud to run the latest stable version with the data directory set to data in the current working directory. Feel free to customize the data directory as you wish, as long as you create config.toml in your chosen data directory using the instructions below. The data section of the Docker command should always look like -v "/path/to/data:/data".

Note that the official Docker image only supports Linux x86_64. Other operating systems and architectures are not supported. However, pull requests contributing such support are welcome.

Run pip3 install . to install the bot along with all of its dependencies. After that, you can choose to either invoke it using the pyrobud command, or run the bot in-place (which is described later in the Usage section).

It is highly recommended to install everything inside a virtual environment to minimize contamination of the system Python install, since many of the bot's dependencies are not typically packaged by Linux distributions. Such environments can easily be created using the following command: python3 -m venv [target directory]

They can then be activated using source [target directory]/bin/activate or the equivalent command and script for your shell of choice.

You can still install all the dependencies in your system Python environment, but please be aware of the potential issues when doing so. The installed packages may conflict with the system package manager's installed packages, which can cause trouble down the road and errors when upgrading conflicting packages. You have been warned.

Copy config.example.toml to config.toml and edit the settings as desired. Each and every setting is documented by the comments above it.

Obtain the API ID and hash from Telegram's website. TREAT THESE SECRETS LIKE A PASSWORD!

Configuration must be complete before starting the bot for the first time for it to work properly.

To start the bot, type python3 main.py if you are running it in-place or use command corresponding to your chosen installation method above.

When asked for your phone number, it is important that you type out the full phone number of your account, including the country code, without any symbols such as spaces, hyphens, pluses, or parentheses. For example, the US number +1 (234) 567-8910 would be entered as 12345678910. Any other format will be rejected by Telegram.

After the bot has started, you can run the help command to view all the available commands and modules. This can be done anywhere on Telegram as long as you prepend the command prefix to the name of the command you wish to invoke. The default prefix (if you haven't changed it in the config) is ., so one would type .help to run the command. All other commands work the same way, save for snippet replacements which are used with /snipname/ anywhere in a message.

For long-term server deployments, an example systemd service is available here. It is strongly recommended to use this service for any long-term deployments as it it includes parameters to improve security and restrict the system resources the bot can utilize to limit damage if something goes awry. The example assumes that the bot will run under an independent user named pyrobud with a virtual environment located at /home/pyrobud/venv and a Git clone of the bot located at /home/pyrobud/pyrobud. This setup avoids tainting the system's Python install with unmanaged packages and allows the bot to self-update using Git.

tmux or screen should never be used to run the bot in production. A supervisor, unlike a terminal multiplexer, contains a plethora of features crucial for proper deployments: automatic ratelimited restarting, logging, monitoring, and more. Some, such as systemd, also support limiting resources and and imposing restrictions for security. A shell script that invokes Python in a while loop is not a replacement for a proper supervisor.

Feel free to join the official support group on Telegram for help or general discussion regarding the bot. You may also open an issue on GitHub for bugs, suggestions, or anything else relevant to the project.