Telegram Public Channel Scraper

This Apify Actor scrapes messages from public Telegram channels and groups. It uses the public web preview (t.me/s/<username>) to fetch messages without requiring a Telegram account or API credentials.

Features

• No Login Required: Works with public channels/groups.
• Incremental Scraping: Keeps track of the last processed message ID to only fetch new messages in subsequent runs.
• Media Extraction: Extracts URLs for images and video thumbnails.
• Proxy Support: Configurable proxy settings (defaults to Apify Proxy).

Input

| Field | Type | Description | Default |

Str	Str	Str	Str
startUrls	Array	List of Telegram channel URLs (e.g., https://t.me/durov).	[]
usernames	Array	List of Telegram usernames (e.g., durov).	[]
maxMessages	Integer	Max messages to scrape per channel.	100
proxyConfiguration	Object	Proxy settings.	{"useApifyProxy": true, "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"]}
debugMode	Boolean	Enable debug logging.	false

Output

The actor stores results in the default Apify Dataset. Each item represents a message:

{
  "id": 123,
  "channel_username": "durov",
  "url": "https://t.me/durov/123",
  "text": "Hello world...",
  "date": "2023-10-27T10:00:00+00:00",
  "views": "1.5K",
  "media_urls": ["https://..."],
  "scraped_at": "2023-11-24T12:00:00.000000"
}

Limitations

• Public Only: Cannot scrape private groups or channels without a username.
• Web Preview Limits: The web preview (t.me/s/...) might not show all historical messages or very old messages easily. This actor is best for monitoring new messages.
• Rate Limits: Telegram may rate limit requests. The actor uses httpx with retries, but aggressive scraping should be avoided.

Local Development

To run the actor locally, it is recommended to use a virtual environment to avoid dependency conflicts:

# Create virtual environment
python -m venv venv

# Activate virtual environment
# Windows:
.\venv\Scripts\activate
# Linux/Mac:
source venv/bin/activate

# Install dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Run the actor
apify run

License

Apache 2.0