How to make your own bot on Bluesky

This tutorial will use Bluesky's official protocol implementation atproto in Typescript, but other implementations are listed here.

Steps:

Pick a username and create an account for your bot. You will need a Bluesky invite code for this. For this emoji bot, I created an account with the handle skies.bsky.social.
Clone this repo and run npm install. Set your username and password in a .env file in the root directory. If you don't have Typescript installed, run npm install -g typescript. You can read more about Typescript here.
You'll be working mostly in the index.ts file. Think of this file as a script that your bot will constantly be running. For this emoji bot, I used a cron job to run the main function every three hours.
To test this script locally, compile your Typescript with tsc -p . and run with node index.js.
Once the output of your bot looks good to you, you're ready to deploy it! You can use services like Heroku or Fly.io – I'll provide basic instructions for both and link out to their own docs.

Heroku: This repo includes a Procfile already. Push your code to a Github repo and follow these instructions to deploy.
Fly.io: You can deploy your project directly from your Terminal with these steps, which will handle making the Dockerfile for you.

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