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Telegram

Connect your agent to Telegram so users can chat with it via a bot. The agent polls or receives messages from Telegram, and the Pai sidecar injects the real bot token on every API call.

Create a bot​

  1. Open Telegram and search for @BotFather
  2. Send /newbot
  3. Choose a display name and a username (must end in bot)
  4. BotFather replies with your token — a string like 7123456789:AAH1bGc...

Setup​

# 1. Store the token
pai add secret telegram-token --from-literal token=7123456789:AAH1bGc...

# 2. Create the provider
pai apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: pai.io/v1
kind: Provider
metadata:
  name: telegram-bot
spec:
  type: telegram
  host: api.telegram.org
  auth:
    type: bot-token
    secretRef: telegram-token
    secretKey: token
    agentEnvVar: TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN
  policy:
    allow: ["*"]
  audit:
    logRequests: true
EOF

The agentEnvVar field causes Pai to inject a dummy TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN value into the agent container — enough for Telegram client libraries to initialise, but the sidecar replaces it with the real token on every outbound request.

Attach to an agent​

spec:
  providers:
    - telegram-bot

Verify​

Once the agent is running, send /start to your bot in Telegram. Check that traffic is flowing:

pai status my-agent
# Providers:
#   - telegram-bot (telegram / api.telegram.org) — 5 requests today

Policy examples​

Allow all Telegram methods (most common):

policy:
  allow: ["*"]

Restrict to specific methods:

policy:
  allow:
    - sendMessage
    - getUpdates
    - sendPhoto
    - answerCallbackQuery
  deny:
    - deleteMessage
    - banChatMember