prebuilt-tdlib

Pre-built TDLib  

This package distributes pre-built TDLib shared libraries through npm. The libraries are built on GitHub Actions (prebuilt-tdlib.yml) and published using npm publish --provenance.

Supported systems:

• Linux x86_64, arm64 (requires glibc >= 2.22)
• macOS x86_64, arm64 (requires macOS >= 11.0)
• Windows x86_64

To install prebuilt-tdlib for the latest TDLib version that prebuilt-tdlib supports, run:

$ npm install prebuilt-tdlib

To install prebuilt-tdlib for a specific TDLib version instead of latest, e.g. TDLib v1.8.50, use the td- dist-tags:

$ npm install prebuilt-tdlib@td-1.8.50

To get the list of available versions, run npm info prebuilt-tdlib dist-tags¹.

The TDLib version is important: there is no backward compatibility and the interface you use may significantly change after an update. It is, though, recommended to use the latest TDLib version.

The shared libraries are statically linked against OpenSSL and zlib (for one, to prevent compatibility issues in Node.js). libstdc++ is also linked statically on Linux.

For the dependencies of TDLib (zlib and openssl), except on Windows, the nixpkgs-unstable package repository is used, and the versions of those dependencies reflect the state of nixpkgs-unstable at the time of building of prebuilt-tdlib.

prebuilt-tdlib also includes TypeScript types for the appropriate TDLib version generated via tdl-install-types (using its latest version at the time of publishing prebuilt-tdlib). If you want to override TDLib types, set skipLibCheck to true in your tsconfig.

Usage

The prebuilt-tdlib package exports getTdjson(), which returns the path to the tdjson shared library.

const { getTdjson } = require('prebuilt-tdlib')
console.log(getTdjson())
// Prints a path like:
// '/home/user/proj/node_modules/@prebuilt-tdlib/linux-x64-glibc/libtdjson.so'

This package is primarily meant to be used with tdl. You can pass the path to tdl.configure (since tdl v7.3.0):

const tdl = require('tdl')
const { getTdjson } = require('prebuilt-tdlib')
tdl.configure({ tdjson: getTdjson() })
// ...

The pre-built libraries can also be extracted and used with any other library or programming language.

Versioning conventions

This information is present mostly for maintaining prebuilt-tdlib, it is not strictly necessary for using this package.

Because TDLib does not follow SemVer, not to require the users to manually specify the exact version of prebuilt-tdlib in their package.json, the TDLib version is packed into a single minor version.

prebuilt-tdlib is published to npm under versions 0.xyyyzzz.v, where

• x, y, z correspond to the x.y.z TDLib version (e.g., 1.8.0). The leading zeros are appended to y and z (y=8 becomes y=008).
• v corresponds to the version of prebuilt-tdlib itself, these updates can contain fixes in case some of the builds were broken or include new pre-built libraries for other platforms.
• The major version is always 0.

Example: the npm release for TDLib v1.8.5 is 0.1008005.0.

For convenience, td-x.y.z dist-tags are available. To install prebuilt-tdlib for TDLib v1.8.5, just run npm install prebuilt-tdlib@td-1.8.5, or npm install prebuilt-tdlib@td-1.8.0 for TDLib v1.8.0.

The releases of the prebuilt-tdlib npm package are not git-tagged.

Additionally, TDLib's releasing process is unusual, and most prebuilt-tdlib releases are not connected to any tag release in the TDLib repository. Usually, the prebuilt packages are generated based on the "Update version to x.y.z." TDLib commit (example) or, if subsequent commits have been made before such a commit is pushed to tdlib/td, on the last pushed commit. The commit hash is indicated in prebuilt-tdlib's package.json, see e.g. npm info prebuilt-tdlib tdlib (or tdlib.commit).

Changes

Changes to the building process of prebuilt-tdlib are noted below.

2025-08-11

First published as prebuilt-tdlib@td-1.8.52 (patch 1).

• prebuilt-tdlib now optionally depends on the @prebuilt-tdlib/types package, which contains TypeScript types generated via tdl-install-types for convenience. They still can be overridden by manually generating tdlib-types.d.ts via tdl-install-types and using skipLibCheck: true in tsconfig.
• Added getTdlibInfo() function that returns the commit hash and version of TDLib.

2024-11-17

First published as prebuilt-tdlib@td-1.8.40.

• Minimum macOS version is now 11.0 instead of 10.12.
• The macOS package is split into darwin-x64 and darwin-arm64 instead of using a universal binary.
• The Windows binary is built on the windows-2022 GitHub Actions runner instead of windows-2019.

2024-07-19

First published as prebuilt-tdlib@td-1.8.33.

The building process is significantly changed in this update.

• Changed the structure of the package: instead of packing all binaries into the prebuilt-tdlib package, every binary is split into a separate package, and all the packages are specified in optionalDependencies of prebuilt-tdlib. The same approach is used by, e.g., esbuild and swc. This installs a binary for the user's system only, allowing prebuilt-tdlib to potentially scale for more architectures and libc variants. One downside is that node_modules can't simply be copied to a different platform anymore. The prebuilds directory in the prebuilt-tdlib package is removed.
• On macOS, TDLib is built using macOS SDK from nixpkgs, and the minimal supported macOS version is now 10.12 instead of 10.14. The arm64 macOS library is now tested in the CI using the macos-14 GitHub runner (and not crosscompiled anymore).
• On Linux, TDLib is now built using zig. The minimal glibc version is 2.22 instead of 2.17.
• Added a crosscompiled prebuild for Linux arm64.

Fix (2024-07-21): Fixed codesigning on macOS arm64.

2024-05-08

First published as prebuilt-tdlib@td-1.8.29.

• Added a tdlib: { commit: ..., version: ... } field to package.json. This allows to query information using npm info prebuilt-tdlib tdlib.commit, for example.
• Added commit as an alias for ref to tdlib.json.
• The packages are now published with --provenance.

2023-09-26

First published as prebuilt-tdlib@td-1.8.19.

• The packages now include a prebuilds/tdlib.json file specifying the TDLib commit hash and version.

2023-06-26

First published as prebuilt-tdlib@td-1.8.14.

• Added support for macOS arm64 (M1 / Apple silicon); a universal binary is shipped. However, the arm64 binary is not tested in the CI.
• The Linux binaries are now built on environment with glibc 2.17 instead of 2.31 and work on older Linux distributions. Some cloud environments such as Amazon Linux 2 or Google Cloud Functions (nodejs <= 16) use older glibc, prebuilt-tdlib should run out of the box on these systems now.
• Restored support for older versions of macOS, >= 10.14 is now supported.

Footnotes

• Or, with more convenient output, using jq:

  $ npm info prebuilt-tdlib dist-tags --json | jq 'to_entries | sort_by(.value) | .[].key | select(startswith("td-"))'
  

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