tdl-mcp

Read-only Telegram access for Claude and other MCP hosts, powered by the tdl CLI.

List your chats, read recent messages, and download media — from your own Telegram account — with five simple tools. It never sends messages, never modifies anything, and never touches your login.

🇰🇷 한국어 문서는 여기 있습니다 → README.ko.md

Why tdl-mcp?

Most Telegram MCP servers embed an MTProto library (Telethon, gramjs, …), ask you to create your own Telegram application at my.telegram.org to get an api_id/api_hash, and many of them can send messages on your behalf.

tdl-mcp takes a different, deliberately boring approach:

• Read-only by design. The server can list chats, export messages and download files. That's all. There is no code path that sends, edits, deletes, or logs in.
• No api_id/api_hash setup. Login is handled once, by you, in your terminal with tdl login -T qr — scan a QR code with your phone and you're done. No Telegram app registration needed.
• Built on a battle-tested downloader. tdl (7.5k+ ⭐) does the heavy lifting: fast parallel downloads, resume, --skip-same deduplication.
• Tiny and auditable. One plain-JavaScript file, two dependencies (@modelcontextprotocol/sdk, zod), no build step. You can read the whole server in five minutes.

Claude / MCP host  ←stdio→  tdl-mcp (Node)  →subprocess→  tdl CLI  →MTProto→  Telegram

Quick start

1. Install tdl

# macOS
brew install telegram-downloader

# Linux / WSL
curl -sSL https://docs.iyear.me/tdl/install.sh | sudo bash

# Windows (PowerShell)
iwr -useb https://docs.iyear.me/tdl/install.ps1 | iex

Any version from the one pinned in .tdl-version upward should work — CI continuously tests against that pin (see Compatibility).

2. Log in to Telegram (once)

tdl login -T qr

Scan the QR code with the Telegram mobile app (Settings → Devices → Link Desktop Device). The session is stored in ~/.tdl on your machine and shared by every MCP host — you log in exactly once. tdl-mcp itself never performs or refreshes logins.

3. Add the server to your MCP host

You need Node.js ≥ 22.

Claude Code:

claude mcp add --scope user telegram -- npx -y tdl-mcp

Claude Desktop / any other MCP host (generic mcpServers JSON):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "telegram": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "tdl-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

4. Try it

Ask your assistant things like:

"What Telegram chats do I have? Find the one about quant trading."

"Show me the last 20 messages in @some_channel."

"Download every PDF posted in that channel since message 1500 to ~/Papers."

If a tool reports that you are not logged in, run tdl login -T qr in a terminal and retry — that's the only manual step there is.

Tools

Tool	Arguments	What it does
tg_status	—	Checks whether the tdl session is logged in. Never errors: returns {logged_in:true, chats:N} or {logged_in:false, hint}.
tg_chats	filter?	Lists dialogs as [{id, type, name, username}]; filter is a case-insensitive substring match on name/username/id.
tg_messages	chat, last_n? (default 50, max 500), since_id?, with_text? (default true)	Exports recent media messages from a chat as compact {id, date, file, text} objects (at most 200 returned; truncation is noted). since_id fetches only messages after a known id — handy for incremental reads.
tg_download	chat, since_id?, last_n? (default 100), extensions? (csv, e.g. "xlsx,pdf"), dest? (default ~/Downloads/telegram)	Downloads media from a chat with --skip-same; returns absolute paths of newly downloaded files, or a friendly "no matching files" note.
tg_download_url	urls (array of https://t.me/... links), extensions?, dest?	Downloads the media of specific messages by link. Validates every url starts with https://t.me/.

chat accepts either a numeric id or an @username/domain, exactly as shown by tg_chats.

Environment variables

Variable	Effect
TDL_BIN	Path to the tdl binary. Default: tdl on PATH, falling back to /opt/homebrew/bin/tdl (GUI-launched MCP hosts often don't inherit the Homebrew PATH).
TDL_NS	tdl namespace, passed as -n <ns> on every call. Use it to keep separate Telegram accounts/sessions apart.

Set them in your host's server config, e.g.:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "telegram": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "tdl-mcp"],
      "env": { "TDL_NS": "work" }
    }
  }
}

Compatibility & staying up to date

tdl-mcp shells out to the tdl CLI, so its real dependency is tdl's command-line surface. That surface is guarded automatically:

• .tdl-version pins the tdl release this package is tested against.
• scripts/contract.mjs verifies — without logging in — that every flag the server uses (chat ls -o json, chat export -c/-T/-i/-o/--with-content, dl -f/-u/-i/-d/--skip-same, global -n) still exists in that tdl binary. CI runs it on every push and PR.
• A scheduled workflow watches tdl releases. When a new version appears it runs the contract test against the new binary and scans the release notes for breaking-change markers. Routine updates become a simple version-bump PR; anything suspicious is escalated to an AI-assisted upgrade PR that adapts the wrapper code.

So if you're on a newer tdl than the pin, chances are excellent everything just works — and if it ever wouldn't, this repo finds out before you do.

Development

git clone https://github.com/rixile9999/tdl-mcp.git
cd tdl-mcp
npm install
npm test          # smoke (MCP protocol, login-free) + contract (tdl CLI surface)

• npm run smoke spawns the server over stdio and checks the tool catalog, tg_status shape, and input validation — passes whether or not you are logged in.
• npm run contract checks the installed tdl binary against the CLI surface the server uses. scripts/install-tdl.sh [vX.Y.Z] installs a specific (checksum-verified) tdl release if you want to test against another version.

PRs welcome. Please keep the server read-only — tools that send, edit or delete are out of scope for this project.

Security notes

• The tdl session in ~/.tdl is a full user-account credential — anyone who can read it can act as your Telegram account. Protect it like an SSH key: don't copy it into repos, shared backups, or other machines.
• tdl-mcp never reads or transmits the session itself; it only runs the tdl binary locally. Nothing leaves your machine except tdl's own Telegram traffic.
• Downloads go to a directory you choose (dest), defaulting to ~/Downloads/telegram.

Telegram terms-of-service note

tdl drives a regular user session (MTProto), not a bot. Quiet, read-only, personal-use automation of your own account is generally tolerated, but aggressive crawling can get an account limited: keep ranges modest (last_n, since_id), avoid large parallel pulls, and let --skip-same do its job instead of re-downloading.

License

MIT for everything in this repository.

tdl itself is a separate project licensed under AGPL-3.0. tdl-mcp does not bundle, link, or modify tdl — it invokes the binary you installed as a separate process, so the AGPL applies to tdl, not to this wrapper. You install tdl yourself through official channels (step 1 above).