Quick Start

New to abTARS? This page walks you through what you need and what to decide before installing.

Experienced? Jump straight to Installation for the full technical steps.

What you'll need

1. A computer that stays on — Mac mini, NUC, old laptop, cloud VM, WSL on your desktop. abTARS runs 24/7 on your hardware.

2. Node.js 22+ — the runtime (recommended: Node 24). Install via Homebrew (brew install node@24) on macOS or NodeSource on Linux/WSL.

3. npm — the package manager. Comes with Node.js.

4. A Telegram bot token — create one via @BotFather on Telegram. This is how you'll talk to your agent.

5. A model provider — at least one of:

   • ollama (free, runs locally — good for privacy)
   • OpenRouter (paid, access to all frontier models)
   • Kiro CLI / Gemini CLI / Claude Code (if you already use one)

Decisions to make

How should it run?

Mode	What it means
daemon (recommended)	Installs as an OS service. Auto-restarts on crash, survives reboots, watchdog monitors health. Your agent is always on.
simple	Runs in the background. If it crashes, you restart manually. Good for trying things out.

Which model?

The install ships a pi-stack default (GPT-6 Luna realtime via OpenRouter — add your API key after install) — just install pi with abtars deps install pi. For the best experience beyond that:

• 128K+ context window — smaller models lose context fast with tool use
• Frontier quality (GPT-4o, Claude, Gemini Pro) — better at following instructions, harder to manipulate
• Local models via ollama — fully private, no API costs, but weaker on complex tasks

You can switch models anytime via /model in Telegram. No reinstall needed.

Let your AI install it for you

If you use an agentic coding tool (Kiro, Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Cursor, Copilot), just give it the Installation page and ask it to install abTARS for you. It has all the information it needs — prerequisites, commands, platform-specific steps.

"Install abTARS on this machine following the install guide. Use alpha channel, supervised mode."

That's it. Your AI colleague handles the rest.

Manual install

Follow Installation — it has step-by-step instructions for both Linux/WSL and macOS.

After install

Verify it works

abtars status       # should show bridge: ● running
abtars doctor       # should show all green

Send a message to your bot on Telegram — it should respond.

Telegram commands

Command	What it does
/status	Bridge health, uptime, model
/model	Switch model/provider on the fly
/new	Start a fresh conversation session
/sleep	Trigger sleep + memory consolidation
/help	Full command list

Customize personality

Edit ~/.abmind/memory/core/SOUL.md — this defines who your agent is: name, personality, language, tone. Make it yours.

Updating

abtars update --alpha    # pulls latest source, rebuilds, deploys, restarts

Something broke?

abtars doctor --fix

See Health Check for more.

Security

Keep your bot private (not searchable publicly) when creating it with @BotFather. abTARS has access to your machine via tools. The built-in allowlist blocks unknown senders, but the bot should not be discoverable in the first place. Only people who know the exact bot username should be able to reach it.