Telegram News Digester

Content

• 80% authentic human code
• 20% synthetic LLM hallucinations

Features

• Fetches all messages posted on a given date (defaults to yesterday) from the specified Telegram channels
• Works even when the account is not a member of the channels (public channels are scraped by @username)
• Creates analytical summaries grouping news by topics across all sources
• Publishes to Telegra.ph and posts the link to a designated channel

Configuration and Installation

Telegram App setup

Create a new Telegram application to get API credentials:

• Go to https://my.telegram.org/apps

• Create application and save api_id and api_hash

• See Telethon docs for details

Important: The device_model, system_version, and app_version fields in config are mandatory. Telegram actually bans accounts if these are mis-specified or suspicious.

Configuration

Copy and edit configuration files:

# Channel lists, timezone, etc
cp inst/config.example.yaml config.yaml
# Credentials
cp inst/example.env .env

Sign in once and save the session file.

Usage

# Generate the digest for yesterday and post it to the summary channel
tgester summarise -c config.yaml -e .env

# Pick a date and/or override the channels; --dry-run publishes to Telegra.ph
# but skips the channel post and just prints the URL (handy for testing)
tgester summarise -c config.yaml -e .env \
    --date 2026-06-19 --channels @nplusone,@bbbreaking --dry-run

# Print the messages a date would pull, without the LLM or publishing (debug)
tgester fetch -c config.yaml -e .env --channels @nplusone --date 2026-06-19

# List the Claude models your API key can access (newest first)
tgester models -e .env

A relative session path in the config is resolved against the config file's directory, so the commands work from any working directory.

Deployment

Examine and run scripts/deploy.sh.

License

WTFPL