Deploy your first Rasptele bot
July 19, 2026 ยท View on GitHub
This tutorial deploys the released Rasptele image on a 64-bit Raspberry Pi. You need Docker Engine with Compose, outbound access to Telegram, and a Telegram account.
1. Create Telegram credentials
Open @BotFather, run /newbot, and save the token. Send a message to the new bot, then find your positive numeric user ID:
curl -s "https://api.telegram.org/bot<TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN>/getUpdates"
Read result[].message.from.id from the response.
2. Configure Rasptele
Use an exact release tag so both the Compose definition and image version are immutable. Release-it keeps this example synchronized with the release containing these instructions:
git clone --branch v0.3.0 --depth 1 https://github.com/maddhruv/rasptele.git
cd rasptele
cp .env.example .env
chmod 600 .env
Set these two values in .env:
TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN=<TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN>
TELEGRAM_ALLOWED_USER_ID=<TELEGRAM_ALLOWED_USER_ID>
All other variables have defaults. No host configuration file is required.
3. Start and verify
docker compose config --quiet
docker compose up -d
docker compose ps
The stack pulls one released image and starts rasptele, docker-guard, and rasptele-watchdog without publishing host ports. Send /start and /status to the bot in a private Telegram chat.