Telegram Knowledge-Base Bot

Current Status

The MVP was deployed. In a Telegram group, a user could mention the bot with a question; the bot retrieved relevant knowledge-base material and generated an answer with an LLM. Mentioning it without a question returned site navigation.

Deployment

Pushing to main triggered GitHub Actions to:

1. Upload knowledge-base Markdown to /srv/knowledge_base/.
2. Upload bot/ to /srv/kb_bot/.
3. Write /srv/kb_bot/bot/.env.
4. Rebuild the complete RAG vector index with python3 retriever.py.
5. Restart the kb_bot systemd service.
6. Add the Nginx location idempotently on the first deployment.

Production secrets were stored under GitHub Actions → Settings → Environments → prod → Secrets.

Environment Variables

Variable	Purpose
TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN	Token issued by BotFather
BOT_USERNAME	Bot username without @, used to filter group mentions
COMPATIBLE_BASE_URL	Base URL for an LLM-compatible API
COMPATIBLE_API_KEY	API key for that endpoint
OPENROUTER_API_KEY	OpenRouter key used for embeddings
KB_PATH	Markdown directory, default /srv/knowledge_base
INDEX_PATH	ChromaDB index directory, default /srv/kb_index
GITHUB_TOKEN	Fine-grained read-only token for private repository commits in /recent

Using the Bot

In a group, mention the bot and include a question, for example @my_kb_bot What is RAG?. A mention without a question opens navigation. In a private chat, send the question directly.

Command	Behavior
/start, /help	Feature introduction and usage
/nav	Site navigation with page links
/site	Site entry points
/categories	Browse knowledge-base categories and articles
/today	Current date
/status	Number of loaded documents
/recent	Summarize recent GitHub commits and pending work, then suggest next steps
/save	Run knowledge-capture steps 1–3 on the current session and preview a write decision
/save <text>	Capture supplied text from step 2 onward and preview a write decision

Session Isolation

Conversation history was keyed by {chat_id}:{user_id}:{session_key}. The chat ID identified a group or private chat, the user ID isolated participants, and the session key combined the date with a sequence number. Thirty minutes of inactivity started a new session. For example, two users in the same group had different histories, and one user's later session also had a different key.

Limits and Follow-Up Work

• Session memory was added with a seven-day Redis TTL.
• Keyword matching was replaced with RAG vector retrieval.
• /save supported extraction, routing, and a preview of the write decision. Confirmation and the actual write step were still pending.
• A hard-coded chat_id allowlist restricted which groups could use the bot.
• Messages from any bot account were ignored to prevent loops between bots.