Use Telegram Messager on Ubuntu

Introduction

Telegram Messenger is a multi-platform messaging app which focuses on both speed and security. In this tutorial, we are going to install Telegram CLI on an Ubuntu VPS. Telegram CLI doesn't have any pre-built packages, so we will have to compile it from source.

Install pre-requisites

Telegram has a few dependencies. Install the following packages by running the command below.

sudo apt-get install gcc libreadline-dev libconfig-dev libssl-dev lua5.2 liblua5.2-dev libevent-dev libjansson-dev libpython-dev make git

Download Telegram CLI source

Clone the Telegram CLI git repo.

git clone  --recursive https://github.com/vysheng/tg.git

Compile and install

Navigate to the tg folder, configure, and make the program.

cd tg
./configure
make

Finally, move the executable to /bin.

mv /bin/telegram-cli /bin/

The installation is now complete. You can now run the command telegram-cli from your shell. For further reading, Telegram CLI commands are listed on the Telegram CLI GitHub page in the "Supported Commands" section.