Telegram
Finish Setup and Config first. Then open your bot in Telegram and send a message.
Only Telegram user ids in allowed_user_ids can talk to that bot. Anyone else is ignored. An empty allowlist refuses to start.
A normal chat
Section titled “A normal chat”Send a question the way you would message a person. You can drop a file in the chat. RustFox calls sandboxed tools (files, commands, and any MCP tools you configured) and keeps the conversation in SQLite under the fox-home.
When more than one bot is configured, each bot is its own Telegram chat, with its own persona, model, and tool list. They share one fox-home. Adding a bot is on Config.
Commands you will actually type
Section titled “Commands you will actually type”The full Active list, including subforms, is on Commands. These are the ones that come up in daily use:
| Command | Use it when |
|---|---|
/start |
You want the short welcome and the command list |
/clear |
You want this chat’s history cleared |
/models |
You want a different model for this bot |
/verbose |
You want tool progress on or off |
/portal |
You want the browser URLs for this machine (Portal) |
/config |
You want to read or change an allowlisted setting |
/restart |
You changed a setting that only applies after a process restart |
/agents |
You want to list bots, or create one and bind a token |
/selfupgrade |
You want to upgrade in place |
/selfupgrade (bare, main, or release) is documented on Update. It is not the same as /restart.
/config set only writes allowlisted keys. It does not accept bot tokens or API keys. After a write that needs a restart, send /restart. The allowlist of keys is in GUIDE.md.
Supervisor commands such as /supervise and /tasks are not shipped. See Commands.