Docs / Quick Start

From Zero to a Live Bot

Five steps, about 20 minutes. By the end you have a chatbot handling a real channel, with its admin panel, running on your own cloud and with your own AI key. Your agent does the technical work; you pick the business and approve.

What You Need

Before you start, have three things on hand. None of this costs anything to get going:

The AI key is never typed into the chat: it's saved as a Cloudflare secret at deploy time (step 2). If you're missing something, your agent walks you through getting it in the masterclass or by following the configurar-mi-chatbot skill.

The 5 Steps

1. 1 · Create your bot with forjabot init

   The wizard asks you for the language, validates your license (or creates a free one on the fly), and lets you pick your bot. The Chatbot Starter is free; the 14 business types —barbershop, restaurant, real estate…— unlock with Forja +. For the Starter, it runs an onboarding of ~6 questions about your business (name, what you do, your offer, hours, location, and which email gets notified) and you pick the AI brain. When it's done, your bot already knows what you do.

   TerminalCopy

   # from zero: a single command, free
   $ npx forjabot init
   ? Language          ›  Spanish
   ? License           ›  Start free
   ✓ license created · plan free
   ? Pick your bot     ›  Chatbot Starter   (all 14 types → Forja +)
   ✓ template ready → ./mi-bot
   ? AI brain          ›  Claude · OpenAI · Grok
   # ~6 questions about your business: name, what you do, offer, hours, location…
   ✓ your bot already knows what you do
   → cd mi-bot · tell your agent: "configure my chatbot"

2. 2 · Deploy it to Cloudflare

   Now your agent puts it online. It saves your AI key as a secret (never written into the code or the chat) and publishes the bot with pnpm deploy. In seconds you have your own Cloudflare URL — and right there lives your panel at /admin, password-protected. Open it: it's your command center.

   Terminal · run by your agentCopy

   # your AI key goes in as a secret, never as plain text
   $ wrangler secret put ANTHROPIC_API_KEY
   ✓ secret saved to your Cloudflare
   $ pnpm deploy
   ✓ uploaded to Cloudflare Workers
   ↗ live panel → https://mi-bot.tu-sub.workers.dev/admin

   Log into the panel with the user admin and the password you set. You'll see the Overview with everything at zero — normal, your bot isn't talking to anyone yet. That changes in the next step.

3. 3 · Connect a channel

   This is where your bot stops being alone. You connect a channel so it can receive messages: Telegram Free is the fastest to test with; WhatsApp via Twilio Forja + is what most businesses use. It's not a magic command: your agent follows the configurar-mi-chatbot skill step by step — it gets the channel's token, saves it as a secret, and points the webhook to your worker. You just hand over the token when it asks for it.

   Your agent connects the channels, following a skill

   There's no forjabot conectar. Connecting WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, or Telegram is a guided procedure your agent runs. Tell it "connect WhatsApp for me" and it does the rest. The full recipe for each channel is in Connections.

4. 4 · Run your first test

   From your phone, send a real message to the channel you connected — a simple "hi, what time do you open?" is enough. The bot should reply on its own, using what it learned from your ~6 answers. Go back to the panel and refresh the Overview: you'll see the conversation, the message count for the last 24 hours, and your first unique customer. If something went wrong, the Troubleshooting section covers the common hiccups.

5. 5 · Run it with your agent

   Once the bot is live, the day-to-day is talking to your agent. Ask it for the month's /reporte (conversations, escalations, leads), fine-tune it with /mantenimiento, win back clients with /campaña. These are skills, not CLI commands: you talk to it normally and it knows which one to run. The full catalog is in Agent Commands.

Check That It's All Good

If something isn't responding or you want a quick check-up, run forjabot doctor. It checks that the folder and key files are there, that your license is still valid, that the version is up to date, and —the important part— that your worker is online and responding at /admin. It tells you with ✓ / ⚠ / ✗ and counts how many issues it found.

$ npx forjabot doctor
✓ bot folder · mi-bot
✓ key files · wrangler.toml · package.json · member/config.local.ts
✓ configuration · BOT_NAME · BOT_NICHE · DASHBOARD_BASE_URL
✓ version up to date · 1.2.0
✓ valid license · plan free
✓ worker online · /admin responds
✓ 0 issues — your bot is healthy

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