Add your agent to Telegram

You can add your agent to Telegram as a bot

Use the TelegramTransport Mixin (opens in a new tab) to connect your agent to a Telegram Bot.

A full working example is here (opens in a new tab). You can copy and paste this agent into your api.py file or use it as a reference.

Adding the TelegramTransport Mixin

1. Add TelegramTransport to the static USED_MIXIN_CLASSES list in your AgentService

2. Add a bot_token configuration parameter to your agent:

   class ExampleTelegramAgent(AgentService):
       class ExampleTelegramAgent(Config):
           bot_token: str = Field(description="The secret token for your Telegram bot")
    
       @classmethod
           def config_cls(cls) -> Type[Config]:
               return ExampleTelegramAgent.ExampleTelegramAgent

3. Register TelegramTransport in your AgentService __init__ with

   self.add_mixin(TelegramTransport(
       self.client,
       config=TelegramTransportConfig(bot_token=self.config.bot_token),
       self,
       self.agent
   ))

Getting a Telegram Bot Token

To get a Telegram Bot Token:

1. Contact the @BotFather (opens in a new tab) on Telegram
2. Run the /newbot command
3. Name your bot
4. Copy the bot token that you are given

Testing your Telegram Connection

You do not need to deploy your agent to test the telegram connection -- you can test with Telegram directly from your local machine. Just follow these steps:

1. Create a config.json file that contains the configuration of your AgentService. This will now include a required bot_token field that contains your Telegram bot token.
2. Run ship run local -c config.json to run a local copy of your Agent with the provided configuration.

It will automatically connect to Telegram using a public NGROK URL.

Using your Telegram Connection in Production

After deploying, when you create an instance from the web just select Optional Configuration from the instance creation screen.

Then enter the telegram_token.

You can find instructions for how to generate a Telegram bot key from the field in the UI.