ccbot 1.6.0

Command & Control Bot — manage AI coding agents from Telegram via tmux

CCBot — Command & Control Bot

Control AI coding agents from your phone. CCBot bridges Telegram to tmux — monitor output, respond to prompts, and manage sessions without touching your computer. Supports Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Gemini CLI.

Why CCBot?

AI coding agents run in your terminal. When you step away — commuting, on the couch, or just away from your desk — the session keeps working, but you lose visibility and control.

CCBot fixes this. The key insight: it operates on tmux, not any agent's SDK. Your agent process stays exactly where it is, in a tmux window on your machine. CCBot reads its output and sends keystrokes to it. This means:

• Desktop to phone, mid-conversation — your agent is working on a refactor? Walk away and keep monitoring from Telegram
• Phone back to desktop, anytime — tmux attach and you're back in the terminal with full scrollback
• Multiple sessions in parallel — Each Telegram topic maps to a separate tmux window, each can run a different agent

Other Telegram bots wrap agent SDKs to create isolated API sessions that can't be resumed in your terminal. CCBot is different — it's a thin control layer over tmux, so the terminal remains the source of truth.

How It Works

graph LR
  subgraph phone["📱 Telegram Group"]
    T1["💬 Topic: api"]
    T2["💬 Topic: ui"]
    T3["💬 Topic: docs"]
  end

  subgraph machine["🖥️ Your Machine — tmux"]
    W1["⚡ window @0<br>claude ↻ running"]
    W2["⚡ window @1<br>codex ↻ running"]
    W3["⚡ window @2<br>gemini ↻ running"]
  end

  T1 -- "text →" --> W1
  W1 -. "← responses" .-> T1
  T2 -- "text →" --> W2
  W2 -. "← responses" .-> T2
  T3 -- "text →" --> W3
  W3 -. "← responses" .-> T3

  style phone fill:#e8f4fd,stroke:#0088cc,stroke-width:2px,color:#333
  style machine fill:#f0faf0,stroke:#2ea44f,stroke-width:2px,color:#333
  style T1 fill:#fff,stroke:#0088cc,stroke-width:1px,color:#333
  style T2 fill:#fff,stroke:#0088cc,stroke-width:1px,color:#333
  style T3 fill:#fff,stroke:#0088cc,stroke-width:1px,color:#333
  style W1 fill:#fff,stroke:#2ea44f,stroke-width:1px,color:#333
  style W2 fill:#fff,stroke:#2ea44f,stroke-width:1px,color:#333
  style W3 fill:#fff,stroke:#2ea44f,stroke-width:1px,color:#333

Each Telegram Forum topic binds to one tmux window running an agent CLI. Messages you type in the topic are sent as keystrokes to the tmux pane; the agent's output is parsed from session transcripts and delivered back as Telegram messages.

Features

Session control

• Send messages directly to your agent topic
• /commands shows commands supported by that topic's provider (Claude/Codex/Gemini)
• Forwarded slash commands report provider mismatch errors (for example Claude-only /cost in Codex)
• Command menu auto-switches per user/chat to the active topic provider after interaction
• Interactive prompts (AskUserQuestion, ExitPlanMode, Permission) rendered as inline keyboards
• Codex edit approvals are reformatted for Telegram readability (compact summary + short preview, with approval choices preserved)
• Codex /status replies include a bot-side transcript snapshot (session + token/rate-limit stats) when Codex does not emit a normal transcript message
• Multi-pane support — auto-detects blocked panes, surfaces prompts, /panes command for overview
• Terminal screenshots — capture the current pane (or any specific pane) as a PNG image
• Sessions dashboard (/sessions) — overview of all sessions with status and kill buttons

Real-time monitoring

• Assistant responses, thinking content, tool use/result pairs, and command output
• Live status line showing what the agent is currently doing
• MarkdownV2 formatting with automatic plain text fallback

Session management

• Directory browser for creating new sessions from Telegram
• Auto-sync: create a tmux window manually and the bot auto-creates a matching topic
• Fresh/Continue/Resume recovery when a session dies
• Message history with paginated browsing (/history)
• Persistent state — bindings and read offsets survive restarts

Multi-provider support

• Claude Code (default), OpenAI Codex CLI, and Google Gemini CLI
• Per-topic provider selection — different topics can use different agents simultaneously
• Auto-detects provider from externally created tmux windows
• Provider-aware recovery (Continue/Resume buttons adapt to each provider's capabilities)

Extensibility

• Global Telegram menu includes bot commands + default provider commands (with ↗ prefix); provider-scoped menus auto-refresh per chat/user/topic context with Telegram-scope fallbacks
• Multi-instance support — run separate bots per Telegram group on the same machine
• Configurable via environment variables

Quick Start

Prerequisites

• Python 3.14+
• tmux — installed and in PATH
• At least one agent CLI — claude (default), codex, or gemini installed and authenticated

Install

# Recommended
uv tool install ccbot

# Alternatives
pipx install ccbot                   # pipx
brew install alexei-led/tap/ccbot    # Homebrew (macOS)

Configure

1. Create a Telegram bot via @BotFather
2. Enable Topics in your bot (BotFather > Bot Settings > Groups > Topics in Groups > Enable)
3. Add the bot to a Telegram group that has Topics enabled
4. Create ~/.ccbot/.env:

TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN=your_bot_token_here
ALLOWED_USERS=your_telegram_user_id

Get your user ID from @userinfobot on Telegram.

Install hooks (Claude Code only)

ccbot hook --install

This registers 7 Claude Code hooks (SessionStart, Notification, Stop, SubagentStart, SubagentStop, TeammateIdle, TaskCompleted) for automatic session tracking, instant interactive UI detection, real-time status updates, and agent team notifications. Not needed for Codex or Gemini — those providers are auto-detected from running processes.

If hooks are missing, ccbot warns at startup with the fix command. Hooks are optional — terminal scraping works as fallback.

Run

ccbot

Open your Telegram group, create a new topic, send a message — a directory browser appears. Pick a project directory, choose your agent (Claude, Codex, or Gemini), then choose session mode (✅ Standard or 🚀 YOLO), and you're connected.

Documentation

See docs/guides.md for CLI reference, configuration, upgrading, multi-instance setup, session recovery, and more.

Acknowledgments

CCBot started as a fork of ccbot by six-ddc, who created the original Telegram-to-Claude-Code bridge. This project has since been rewritten and developed independently with multi-provider support, topic-based architecture, interactive UI, and a comprehensive test suite. Thanks to six-ddc for the initial idea and implementation.

License

MIT