downloaderbot

Downloader bot

This bot downloads media files from Instagram and YouTube and uploads them to the telegram bot

Environment variables

Environment variables are available here

Required environment variables

DOWNLOADERBOT_TELEGRAM_BOT_API_TOKEN= # your telegram bot api token

Known limitations

• Inline results are capped at 20MB, not 50MB. An inline result can only reference a URL, and Telegram downloads it itself — which the Bot API limits to "5 MB max size for photos and 20 MB max for other types of content". That is much stricter than the 50MB a bot may upload directly, so a video between 20MB and 50MB is delivered normally in a direct message but cannot be sent inline; the bot offers a download link for it instead. Instagram reels run past 20MB routinely — a two-minute 1080x1920 reel is around 22MB.
• TikTok is not available in inline mode. TikTok CDN URLs only serve the video when the request carries the browser's cookies + a tiktok.com referer, so the bot has to download the bytes itself (which it does in direct messages). Telegram inline results, however, can only reference a publicly fetchable URL or an already-uploaded file_id — raw bytes cannot be attached. Making TikTok work inline therefore requires either pre-uploading the video to obtain a file_id (needs a storage chat) or proxying it through a public URL; this is planned but not implemented yet. TikTok works normally when the link is sent to the bot in a direct message.
• The gRPC API returns media URLs, not bytes. For TikTok the returned URL needs the same cookies/referer headers to download, which the API does not currently expose, so API clients cannot fetch TikTok videos directly yet.