Bluesky Typescript Bot

This repository contains a starter template for creating a Typescript bot on Bluesky.

💡 Some possible bots:

• Listens to the firehose and replies to every post that contains "tldr-bot" with a summary of the thread it was tagged in (see examples/firehose-bot.ts)
• Posts a random image every hour (see examples/cron-bot.ts)
• Listens to the firehose to see what topics are trending, posts a list of trending topics every 5 minutes

Set Up

1. Create a new Bluesky account for your bot on the app or website (https://bsky.app)
2. Generate an App Password for your bot account in settings (this is just to protect your real password)
3. Make a copy of the example .env file by running: cp .env.example .env
4. Set your bot's username and app password in .env
5. npm i

Building your bot

Modify the index.ts script however you like to make this bot your own. The /examples director has firehose-bot.ts and cron-bot.ts - if you want your bot to respond to some kind of event live, you want firehose-bot. If instead you want to do something on a timer, use cron-bot. You might also want to do something that's kind of both (i.e. it listens to the websocket to index/aggregate data and then does something on a schedule, like say what the sentiment is for a given search term)

Running your bot

You can run the script locally: ts-node index.ts. You should see a smiley emoji posted to your Bluesky account.

Data

Data availability is a huge perk of atproto--data can be accessed by crawling the repos yourself, ingesting the firehose, querying bluesky's AppView, or querying someone else's service (like a labeler or feed generator).

For convenience we included samples of tables in data/. These are just samples, not the full tables.

Deploying your bot

For development, it's simplest to just run the bot locally (ts-node index.ts). When you want to deploy it for real, there are many free or low cost cloud hosting options like Heroku or Fly.io.