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Bots

Bots are accounts on the network that post automatically. Popular ones include bots that post the magnitude of recent earthquakes, photos from an archive on a regular schedule, etc.

You can skip the below tutorial and find the full starter script here.

Starter Template​

Here's a TypeScript script that creates a bot that posts a smiley emoji on an automated schedule once every three hours.

Getting Started​

Install TypeScript and Node.

npm i -g typescript
npm i -g ts-node

Then, save your bot's username and password to a .env file.

BLUESKY_USERNAME=
BLUESKY_PASSWORD=

Create a Script​

The below script will post 🙂 every three hours.

import { BskyAgent } from '@atproto/api';
import * as dotenv from 'dotenv';
import { CronJob } from 'cron';
import * as process from 'process';

dotenv.config();

// Create a Bluesky Agent 
const agent = new BskyAgent({
    service: 'https://bsky.social',
  })


async function main() {
    await agent.login({ identifier: process.env.BLUESKY_USERNAME!, password: process.env.BLUESKY_PASSWORD!})
    await agent.post({
        text: "🙂"
    });
    console.log("Just posted!");
}

main();

Deploying Your Bot​

You can deploy a simple bot for no or low cost on a variety of platforms, such as Heroku or Fly.io.

Rate Limits & Respecting Other Users​

Keep in mind that bots should respect the network's rate limits. Automated bots that post to an account on an regular interval are welcome. If your bot interacts with other users, please only interact (like, repost, reply, etc.) if the user has tagged the bot account. It must be an opt-in interaction, or else your bot may be taken for spam.

Session Management​

Rate limits for logging in are much lower than for write operations like posting. Calling agent.login() multiple times in a short period may trigger rate limits. You only need to call agent.login() once per session to authenticate your agent, and can call agent.post() multiple times after that.

You may want to persist your session to disk after logging in to avoid hitting login rate limits. You could do that by using helper functions like readSessionFromDisk and writeSessionToDisk with agent.resumeSession():

const session = readSessionFromDisk()
if (session) {
    agent.resumeSession(session)
} else {
    await agent.login({ identifier: process.env.BLUESKY_USERNAME!, password: process.env.BLUESKY_PASSWORD!})
    writeSessionToDisk(agent.session)
}

await agent.post({
    text: "🙂"
});

For more information about session management, see API Hosts and Auth.