I’ve been hanging out over on Bluesky the last few weeks. While bumming around on there, I found this library called @skyware/bot and was surprised by how simple building out bots for the app is.
Minimum viable bot
No, seriously, it’s so easy! All you need is a bit of JavaScript:
import { Bot } from "@skyware/bot";
const bot = new Bot();
// I would use an app password for this if you can!
// app password: a temporary password you can create and revoke as needed.
await bot.login({ identifier: "your-username", password: "your-password" });
bot.on("reply", async (post) => {
await post.reply({ text: "Thanks for replying to my post!" });
await post.like();
await post.author.follow();
})
There ya go! you have a bot that:
- logs into your Bluesky account.
- listens for replies to any of your posts.
- likes and responds to replies of your posts.
- follows anyone who replies to your posts.
Dice rolling bot
I also spent some time messing around to see if I could get the bot responding to private messages and built out a little bot that will roll a virtual dice for you over private messages.
You can check the code out for it on my GitHub.
Deploying the bot
Not to harp on, but deploying these bots to Railway is comically simple. Just log in, create a project, create a repo service, add your username/password as environment variables, and you’re good to go.
That said, you could run these things on anything that’s internet connected! The bot doesn’t need to expose a web server or anything, it just sends API calls out to Bluesky. You could host it on your freaking laptop if you want- as long as your computer is online the bot should respond!
Moving forward
I’ll probably build a bunch more features into my bot but I was so impressed by how easy this was that I figured I’d share early!
I have a few ideas on how to build out the bot further like an article text-to-speech generator and maybe integrating an LLM to handle the function calling as opposed to strict commands like I have for the dice bot right now.