Project Structure

Main interface

The library itself is under the telethon/ directory. The __init__.py 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 the TelegramBareClient. The later is basically a pruned version of the TelegramClient, which knows basic stuff like .invoke()’ing requests, downloading files, or switching between data centers. This is primary to keep the method count per class and file low and manageable.

Both clients make use of the network/mtproto_sender.py. The MtProtoSender class handles packing requests with the salt, id, sequence, etc., and also handles how to process responses (i.e. pong, RPC errors). This class communicates through Telegram via its .connection member.

The Connection class uses a extensions/tcp_client, a C#-like TcpClient to ease working with sockets in Python. All the TcpClient know is how to connect through TCP and writing/reading from the socket with optional cancel.

The Connection class bundles up all the connections modes and sends and receives the messages accordingly (TCP full, obfuscated, intermediate…).

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.