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Want your agent on Telegram? You’re about five minutes and three API calls away from having a bot that responds to DMs with the full power of OpenClaw behind it. Here’s the plan: create a Telegram bot, hand Chowder the token, approve the first user, done.
You need a running Chowder instance. If you don’t have one yet, follow Your First Instance to get set up.

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Set up your environment

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How it works under the hood

When you call the connect endpoint, Chowder does the following on your instance’s sandbox:
  1. Reads the openclaw.json config file
  2. Writes the bot token to channels.telegram.botToken
  3. Enables the channel: channels.telegram.enabled = true
  4. Sets the DM policy: channels.telegram.dmPolicy = "pairing"
  5. Restarts the gateway process so it picks up the new config
The gateway then starts a Telegram bot listener using the Telegram Bot API. Incoming DMs are routed to the agent, and responses are sent back through the bot.

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Other channels

Telegram is a “token-based” channel — you give it a token, it connects. Chowder supports a bunch of these:
These work the same way as Telegram — pass credentials via the connect endpoint:

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What’s next?

Install Skills

Give your bot web search, browser control, and more.

Scoped API Keys

Create restricted keys so your bot management doesn’t need your org key.