Connect a chat app

Nothing reaches an agent unless a gateway delivers it. A fresh daemon with no bot token is reachable only from the dashboard and nouride chat — which is deliberate, and enough to get going.

When you are ready to reach it from your phone, add a connection.

One bot per agent, not one bot for everything

Every connection is named: telegram:nouva is the Telegram bot called nouva. That name is what lets one daemon run a separate identity per agent instead of a single bot that switches personality.

A connection can name an agent as its owner, and then everything it receives goes to that agent unless somebody else is addressed by name.

From the dashboard

This is the shorter path, and the one that does not need you to touch a file.

Agents → your agent → Connections.
Add a connection, pick the platform, paste the token.
Save, then restart — the page offers a button.

The restart is not optional and the dashboard says so: gateway adapters are built at boot, so a saved connection is not yet a running one. The page shows “not started” rather than “disconnected” for a connection that has never come up, because those are different problems.

Credentials are write-only here. The token field on an existing connection is empty, and empty means leave it alone — nothing reads a credential back, so there is no masked placeholder to accidentally overwrite.

The Connections tab of an agent

From the config file

The same thing, in .nouride/config.toml. Store the token first — the config file holds only the name of a secret:

# Piped in rather than typed as an argument, so it never lands in your shell history.
printf '%s' '123456:ABC-DEF...' | nouride secret set telegram-nouva --value-stdin

[gateways.telegram.nouva]
enabled = true
token = "telegram-nouva"     # the NAME of the secret → $TELEGRAM_NOUVA, or the secret store
agent = "nouva"              # this bot is Nouva's

Then restart the daemon.

Talk to @BotFather, /newbot, and copy the token.
Store it and add the connection, as above.
Message the bot.

In groups, Telegram only delivers messages your bot was not addressed in once privacy mode is off. Either /setprivacy → Disable in BotFather, or make the bot a group admin. Without that your agent sees only messages that mention it — which is a reasonable setting, just not the one people expect when they set group_context_messages.

Approvals arrive in the chat as buttons. See approvals.

Full Telegram page →

Discord

Create an application and a bot in the Discord developer portal.
Enable the Message Content intent under the Bot tab. Without it every message arrives empty, which looks like the bot ignoring you.
Invite the bot to your server, then store the token and add the connection.

[gateways.discord.main]
enabled = true
token = "discord-main"
agent = "nouva"

Which channels an agent answers in is set on the agent, not the connection — see the Discord page for why, and for the cache settings that matter when you run several Discord bots on one daemon.

WhatsApp has no bot token. You link a device by scanning a QR code from the phone that holds the number, once.

[gateways.whatsapp.main]
enabled = true
encryption_key = "wa-encryption-key"   # secret NAME; the value is 64 hex characters

Generate the key and store it before you start:

openssl rand -hex 32 | nouride secret set wa-encryption-key --value-stdin

What comes back from a scan is a login, not a token, so it is stored AES-256-GCM under that key. A copy of the session directory without the key is useless; a copy with it is a working login. Keep the key, or the next restart asks for a new scan.

Then start the daemon and open the dashboard — the QR appears under the agent’s Connections.

WhatsApp runs in a separate process, because the library it needs is GPL-3.0 and process isolation is where that boundary sits. It is in the tarball; nothing extra to install.

Full WhatsApp page →

Nobody can talk to it yet

By default a stranger who messages one of your bots gets a pairing code and waits — they cannot reach an agent until you approve them.

nouride access                  # who is waiting, and who is already in
nouride access approve <code>

Or from Agents → your agent → Access. This is a different queue from tool approvals, and confusing the two has cost people an hour: an approval is an agent stopped mid-turn wanting to run something; access is a person asking to be let in at all.

Who may talk to it →