Guides

Bot development guides

13 guides written for builders. Read them in order for a complete course, or jump straight to your platform.

What a bot is, how to pick a platform, polling versus webhooks, and the minimum production checklist.

Create a bot with BotFather, handle updates with polling or webhooks, add inline keyboards and stay within limits.

Send and receive WhatsApp messages through Meta's official Cloud API with templates, webhooks and opt-in.

Create a Slack app with a manifest, choose scopes, receive events over HTTP or Socket Mode and verify requests.

Add language models to a bot with tool calling, retrieval and MCP while controlling cost, latency and prompt injection.

Design trigger and action workflows, self-host n8n, handle errors and know when to move to code.

Build webhook receivers that verify signatures, acknowledge fast, deduplicate and retry correctly.

When automated collection is acceptable, how to be a polite crawler, and the lines you should not cross.

Pick the right runtime for polling, Gateway and webhook bots, and run it with restarts, logs and backups.

Deploy a webhook bot at the edge with secrets, storage, background work and scheduled jobs.

A threat model and checklist for bots: secret management, least privilege, signed webhooks, SSRF, injection and leaks.

Keep a bot fast and correct under load: respect 429s, queue work, deduplicate, time out and alert.

Suggested learning path

Read Getting started to choose a platform and an architecture.
Build a first bot on one platform: Telegram is the fastest to set up; Discord and Slack teach you interactions and scopes.
Learn the plumbing: APIs and webhooks, then hosting.
Harden it with security and reliability.
Add intelligence with AI chatbots and agents.