Telegram
Connect Telegram to receive approval requests on your phone and reply to approve or deny held actions without needing to be at your terminal.
Setup takes about three minutes
$ belay connect telegram
belay connect telegram walks you through the full setup interactively:
- You create a Telegram bot using Telegram's BotFather (Belay prompts you through this step).
- You send the bot a message from your own Telegram account so Belay can identify your chat and user ID.
- Belay stores the configuration and switches to out-of-band approval mode. Your bot token is stored as an environment variable reference; it is never written in plaintext to your configuration file.
After setup, the flow is:
- Your agent issues a consequential action. Belay holds it and sends you a Telegram message with the details.
- You reply to approve or deny the action from your phone.
- Your agent resumes (or is told the action was denied).
Who can approve
Only replies from your authenticated Telegram account (the one you verified during setup) count as an approval. Replies from any other account, including bot-generated messages, are discarded. This ensures an agent cannot approve its own actions by generating a Telegram message.
Testing the connection
After setup, verify that Belay can reach your Telegram channel and read replies:
$ belay channels test
This sends a test message and confirms that Belay can read replies from your account. It reports what is working and exactly what to fix if anything fails.
Approval mode: Once Telegram is configured, Belay switches to out-of-band approval mode. The local keychain approval path (belay approve) is disabled by policy while out-of-band mode is active. All approvals must come through Telegram (or any other configured channel).
Prefer Slack? See Slack setup to use a Slack bot as your approval channel instead.