md-to-telegraph

Convert Markdown text into Telegraph DOM nodes and publish pages through the Telegraph API.

Overview

md-to-telegraph transforms a Markdown string into a list of Telegraph-compatible DOM node dicts, suitable for use with the Telegraph API.

Telegraph nodes follow this structure:

{
  "tag": "p",
  "attrs": {"href": "..."},
  "children": ["text", {"tag": "strong", "children": ["bold"]}]
}

Installation

uv add md-to-telegraph

Usage

from md_to_telegraph import md_to_telegraph

nodes = md_to_telegraph("# Hello\n\nThis is **bold** text.")
# [
#   {"tag": "h3", "children": ["Hello"]},
#   {"tag": "p", "children": ["This is ", {"tag": "strong", "children": ["bold"]}, " text."]}
# ]

For extracted content that may need a plain-text fallback, use content_to_telegraph:

from md_to_telegraph import content_to_telegraph

nodes = content_to_telegraph(content_markdown, fallback_text)

To create a page directly, use create_page. The default performs one API request; pass retry_attempts to retry transient failures:

from md_to_telegraph import create_page

url = create_page(
    access_token="telegraph-token",
    title="An article",
    content_markdown=content_markdown,
    fallback_text=fallback_text,
    source_url="https://example.com/article",
    retry_attempts=3,
)

create_page reads YAML front matter from content_markdown. When these arguments are omitted, it uses title, author, and url from the header; explicit arguments always take precedence. The date field is preserved as metadata but Telegraph has no native page-date field. When an author is not available, the source URL's domain is used as the author name, while the complete source URL is sent as author_url.

When the front matter declares a non-document page type such as website, home, collection, or search, create_page refuses to publish it. This prevents accidentally turning site home pages and listings into Telegraph articles.

The same operation is available as a command-line tool. A file uses its stem as the default title; stdin uses its first Markdown heading, or accepts an explicit --title:

md-to-telegraph article.md --access-token "$TELEGRAPH_API_TOKEN"
cat article.md | md-to-telegraph --title "An article"

The token can be passed with --access-token or read from TELEGRAPH_API_TOKEN. To create a new Telegraph account explicitly and use its token for the page, add --create-account (optionally with --short-name). The account creation uses Telegraph's createAccount method.

To create only a token, use the create-account subcommand. It prints a shell assignment and does not publish a page:

md-to-telegraph create-account --short-name lobstersgram
export $(md-to-telegraph create-account --short-name lobstersgram)

The output can also be appended to a shell startup file:

echo "export $(md-to-telegraph create-account --short-name lobstersgram)" >> ~/.bashrc

Markdown features supported

Development

uv run pytest

License

MIT