Team Telegram Assistant with Hermes
Run a shared, always-on Hermes assistant for a small team over Telegram, giving each authorized user private sessions with their own memory for coding, research, and ops.
Requirements
- Create a bot with @BotFather on Telegram and save the token.
- Get your Telegram user ID from @userinfobot for the allowlist.
- Telegram gateway.
- Docker terminal backend (recommended).
- Delegation (for longer-running research tasks).
- Cron (for scheduled team reports).
How to use
Hermes runs on a VPS with the Telegram gateway enabled. Authorized users DM the bot for private sessions or mention it in a shared group, and each user gets their own session state and memory. Terminal-touching commands go through the Docker backend, so a rm -rf at worst destroys a container, not the host. A home channel collects cron output and alerts, including daily briefings, GitHub triage, and backup reports.
Keep the allowlist tight. Anyone in TELEGRAM_ALLOWED_USERS gets full agent access.
The Docker backend is not optional for a shared bot — a local backend means any authorized user can run anything as the VPS user.
A $5 VPS is sufficient per the docs; the constraint is RAM for the model's context, not CPU.
- Provision the Telegram bot credential.
- Add your Telegram user ID to the access plan.
- Install Hermes and run the wizard.
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
hermes setup
- In
.env(or viahermes config set).
TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN=123456789:AAH...
TELEGRAM_ALLOWED_USERS=123456789,987654321
TELEGRAM_HOME_CHANNEL=-1001234567890 # optional — cron delivery target
- Switch the terminal backend to Docker so shell tools run in isolation.
hermes config set terminal.backend docker
- Start the gateway.
hermes gateway install # user service
# or: sudo hermes gateway install --system (systemd, boot-time)
Once the gateway is running, just DM the bot normally.
Some patterns that work well on a shared bot are shown below.
@your_bot_name help me draft a reply to this customer:
> [paste customer message]
/cron add "0 9 * * 1" "Weekly status: pull last 7 days of merged PRs
from gh pr list --repo YOUR_ORG/YOUR_REPO --state merged, group by
author, and post to the home channel."
Source: aliaihub/awesome-hermes-usecases and its contributors. License: CC-BY-4.0. Source license notice.
Translation and editorial adaptation by ClawCases.
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