Post from Telegram to WordPress — Automated CMS Publishing Bot

Publish blog posts, formatted HTML updates, and high-resolution photo attachments directly from a Telegram channel or chat to WordPress via the official /wp/v2/ REST API.

Technical Architecture: Reverse-Engineering the Telegram-to-WordPress Bridge​

Publishing micro-blog updates or photo logs to a WordPress site from a mobile browser requires navigating a heavy admin dashboard. I built post-from-telegram-to-wordpress as a containerized Python daemon that listens to authorized Telegram channels, uploads binary media to /wp-json/wp/v2/media, and publishes structured posts to /wp-json/wp/v2/posts.

[ Telegram Channel / Chat ]
           │
           │ (Telegram Bot API / Event Listener)
           ▼
[ Python Listener Service ]
           │
           ├── 1. Verify Chat ID Allowlist & Extract HTML/Markdown Entities
           ├── 2. Download Highest-Resolution Telegram Photo (photo[-1])
           ├── 3. Upload Binary Stream to WordPress (/wp-json/wp/v2/media)
           │
           ▼ (WordPress Application Password Basic Auth)
[ WordPress REST API (/wp-json/wp/v2/posts) ]
           │
           ▼
[ Live WordPress Post with Featured Image ]

1. WordPress Application Password Authentication​

Instead of relying on cookie sessions or main user passwords, the bridge authenticates using WordPress Application Passwords (native since WordPress 5.6), encoding username:app_password as an RFC 7617 Basic Authorization header over HTTPS:

import base64

def get_wp_auth_header(username: str, app_password: str) -> dict:
    credentials = f"{username}:{app_password}"
    token = base64.b64encode(credentials.encode("utf-8")).decode("utf-8")
    return {"Authorization": f"Basic {token}"}

2. Allowlisted Telegram Event Listener​

Incoming updates are filtered against an explicit ALLOWED_CHAT_IDS set so only designated channel administrators or private chats can trigger WordPress publication:

from telegram import Update
from telegram.ext import ContextTypes

ALLOWED_CHAT_IDS = {-100123456789}  # Target Telegram Channel / Admin ID

async def handle_incoming_post(update: Update, context: ContextTypes.DEFAULT_TYPE):
    message = update.effective_message
    if not message or message.chat.id not in ALLOWED_CHAT_IDS:
        return

    text_content = message.text_html or message.caption_html or ""
    photo_attachments = message.photo

    await process_and_publish(text_content, photo_attachments, context.bot)

3. Two-Stage Media & Post Publishing Pipeline​

When a Telegram message includes a photo, the daemon fetches the highest-resolution variant (message.photo[-1]), streams the binary buffer to /wp-json/wp/v2/media with a Content-Disposition filename header, captures the returned attachment id, and binds it as featured_media on the new post:

import requests

def upload_photo_to_wordpress(wp_site_url: str, auth_headers: dict, photo_bytes: bytes, filename: str) -> int:
    media_url = f"{wp_site_url}/wp-json/wp/v2/media"
    headers = {
        **auth_headers,
        "Content-Disposition": f'attachment; filename="{filename}"',
        "Content-Type": "image/jpeg",
    }

    response = requests.post(media_url, headers=headers, data=photo_bytes, timeout=30)
    response.raise_for_status()
    return response.json()["id"]

def create_wordpress_post(
    wp_site_url: str,
    auth_headers: dict,
    title: str,
    html_content: str,
    media_id: int | None = None,
) -> dict:
    posts_url = f"{wp_site_url}/wp-json/wp/v2/posts"
    payload = {
        "title": title,
        "content": html_content,
        "status": "publish",  # Configurable: 'publish' or 'draft'
    }

    if media_id is not None:
        payload["featured_media"] = media_id

    response = requests.post(posts_url, headers=auth_headers, json=payload, timeout=30)
    response.raise_for_status()
    return response.json()

Configuration & Environment Reference​

Security & Deployment Architecture​

• Least-Privilege WordPress Credentials: Uses revokable Application Passwords scoped to a dedicated WordPress Author/Editor account rather than a Super Admin account.
• Strict Origin Filtering: Drops updates from any Telegram chat or user ID not explicitly listed in ALLOWED_CHAT_IDS.
• Stateless Container Execution: Runs inside a python:3.11-slim Docker container without requiring local database volumes or persistent media folders.

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