Telegram Bot Setup

What you’ll learn

• How to create a Telegram bot and obtain a bot token
• How to configure NabaOS to connect to your bot
• How to restrict access to specific chat IDs
• How to enable two-factor authentication (TOTP or password)
• How to test the bot with a message

Prerequisites

• NabaOS installed (nabaos --version)
• A Telegram account
• An LLM provider configured (NABA_LLM_API_KEY)

Step 1: Create a bot via BotFather

1. Open Telegram and search for @BotFather.
2. Send the command /newbot.
3. Choose a display name for your bot (e.g., My NabaOS Agent).
4. Choose a username for your bot. It must end in bot (e.g., my_nabaos_bot).
5. BotFather will reply with your bot token. It looks like this:

7123456789:AAHfiqksKZ8WmR2zSjiQ7_v4TpcG2cCkHHI

Keep this token secret. Anyone with this token can control your bot.

Step 2: Get your chat ID

You need your Telegram chat ID to restrict who can talk to the bot.

1. Search for @userinfobot on Telegram and start a conversation.
2. It will reply with your user ID (a number like 123456789).
3. For group chats, add @userinfobot to the group – it will report the group’s chat ID (a negative number like -1001234567890).

Step 3: Set environment variables

Export the bot token and allowed chat IDs:

export NABA_TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN="7123456789:AAHfiqksKZ8WmR2zSjiQ7_v4TpcG2cCkHHI"
export NABA_ALLOWED_CHAT_IDS="123456789"

For multiple allowed chats, separate IDs with commas:

export NABA_ALLOWED_CHAT_IDS="123456789,-1001234567890"

Step 4: Start the Telegram bot

Run the bot in standalone mode:

nabaos start --telegram-only

Or run it as part of the full server (which also handles scheduled jobs and the web dashboard):

nabaos start

Step 5: Test the bot

Open Telegram and send a message to your bot:

check the weather in Delhi

The bot should respond through the NabaOS pipeline – classifying the intent, checking the constitution, querying the cache or LLM, and returning a result.

If you send a message from a chat ID that is not in NABA_ALLOWED_CHAT_IDS, the bot will ignore it silently.

Enabling two-factor authentication

NabaOS supports 2FA on the Telegram channel. When enabled, users must authenticate before the bot processes their messages.

Option A: TOTP (recommended)

nabaos config security 2fa totp

Configure the environment:

export NABA_TOTP_SECRET="JBSWY3DPEHPK3PXP"

Option B: Password

nabaos config security 2fa password

Running in production

For production deployments, run the server which manages Telegram, scheduled jobs, and optionally the web dashboard:

export NABA_TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN="..."
export NABA_ALLOWED_CHAT_IDS="..."
export NABA_TOTP_SECRET="..."
export NABA_WEB_PASSWORD="your-dashboard-password"

nabaos start

Expected output:

[start] Starting Telegram bot...
[start] Bot username: @my_nabaos_bot
[start] Starting web dashboard on http://127.0.0.1:8919...
[start] Scheduler running (3 scheduled jobs)
[start] Ready.

Environment variable reference

Next steps

• Discord Setup – Set up a Discord bot channel
• Web Dashboard – Access the web interface
• Secrets Management – Store your bot tokens securely in the vault