You have quite a few options when it comes to hosting your bots.
- Self-hosted
- General botmaking platforms
- Hosting your Twitter bots
- Hosting your Mastodon bots
- Hosting your Slack bots
Self-hosted¶
- Glitch: the “easiest way to build the app or bot of your dreams”
- requires a paid subscription to run bots continuously; pinging services, formerly a common and accepted practice, have been banned
- Hosting bots on Glitch
- Creative Bots starter project
- Botwiki starter projects on Glitch
- Pipedream: platform for automating workflows
- See a list of tutorials on Botwiki and a few example bots
- Repl.it: collaborative, in-browser IDE to code in 50+ languages
- free with pinging, or paid with always-on projects
- you can import code from a Glitch project
- DigitalOcean: a popular VPS (Virtual Private Server), starts at $5/month (it’s also used to host this site; our referral link gets you $10 starter credit)
- Google Cloud Platform (Free Tier)
- PythonAnywhere: “Host, run, and code Python in the cloud!”
- AWS Lambda
Note that Heroku no longer offers a free tier.
General botmaking platforms¶
- BOT libre!: create your own chat bot with real artificial intelligence, share it, embed it, connect it to the world
- IFTTT: helps your apps and devices work together
- Flow XO: connect your cloud apps together into automated workflows
Mastodon¶
- Cheap Bots, Toot Sweet!: This site will help you make a Mastobot, much like CBDQ for Twitter bots
Twitter¶
- Cheap Bots, Done Quick!: see tutorials and examples of bots created with CBDQ
- Bracery: A collaborative site for making bots with a Tracery-like language with pre-loaded phrase lists.
- Google Apps Script: see Bradley Momberger‘s blog for more details
- tilde.town (Twitter and IRC bots)
- @beaugunderson is offering to let people host bots on his Linode account
- you can even use your Raspberry Pi
See also: Hosting Slack Integrations on the Slack API Developer Blog.
Latest from the blog
Cheap Bots, Done Quick suspended, this time for good
So long, and thanks for all the bots.
Twitter shutting down free access to their API on February 9
I keep saying it's an end of an era quite often these days.
How do folks get into creative botmaking?
Sharing the stories of our early botmaking days.
What kind of bots are posting in the fediverse?
Exploring the bots people make and follow in the fediverse.