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
- Botwiki starter projects on Glitch
- 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)
- Heroku: offers free “Dyno hours” and a scheduler. See also:
- Pipedream: platform for automating workflows
- Google Cloud Platform (Free Tier)
- PythonAnywhere: “Host, run, and code Python in the cloud!”
- AWS Lambda
General botmaking platforms¶
- Dexter: a platform that makes connecting third-party APIs easy
- 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
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
Mastodon¶
- Cheap Bots, Toot Sweet!: This site will help you make a Mastobot, much like CBDQ for Twitter bots
See also: Hosting Slack Integrations on the Slack API Developer Blog.
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