typegram

Types for the Telegram API

This project provides TypeScript types for the entire Telegram API in version 5.0 which was released on November 4, 2020.

Installation

npm install --save-dev typegram

Available Types

Generally this package just exposes a huge load of interfaces that correspond to the types used throughout the Telegram API.

Note that the API specification sometimes only has one name for multiple variants of a type, e.g. there is a number of different Updates you can receive, but they're all just called Update. This package represents such types as large unions of all possible options of what an Update could be, such that type narrowing can work as expected on your side. If you need to access the individual variants of an Update, refer to Update.MessageUpdate and its siblings.

The same pattern is used for various other types, too.

Available Methods

In addition to the types, this package provides you with another interface Telegram which contains all available methods of the API. There is no further structure applied to this, but if you can come up with something reasonable, please suggest it in an issue or directly open a PR.

Each method takes just a single argument with a structure that corresponds to the object expected by Telegram. If you need to directly access that type, consider using Opts<M> where M is the method name (e.g. Opts<'getMe'>).

Note that Opts<M> will give you an empty object type (i.e. {}) for methods that do not take any parameters. That is to say, it will not give you a type error or undefined (as opposed to something like Parameters<Telegram['getMe']>[0]).

Using Promises

All of the methods are specified with the actual return type of the Telegram API. If you need them to return Promises instead, consider using TelegramP. This type maps all methods of Telegram to a promisified version.

Where do the types come from

They're handwritten.

That is, they're of course not entirely handwritten. The initial version of them were produced in one afternoon by a combination of copying and pasting from the website, VIM magic, regular expressions and VSCode auto-formatting the rest.

After that, some more work and a few community contributions did the polishing.

Future updates to the API will be integrated manually in a similar fashion.

Other people's previous attempts to harvest the types directly from the website using a script failed due to the required effort of handling special cases about the layout of the website.