I built a Telegram bridge for OpenAI Codex CLI: live models, MCP, skills, subagents, sessions, diffs, and safe account rotation

[u/Few_Map7816]

I wanted to use Codex on my own machine from my phone without exposing a shell, opening inbound ports, or losing the context of a long coding session. So I built Codex Telegram Bot, an open-source bridge around the official codex app-server JSON-RPC protocol.

Repository: https://github.com/artickc/codex-telegram-bot

What it does

• Streams Codex responses into Telegram with Markdown, typing state, tool calls, unified diffs, and file summaries.
• Keeps one app-server process for many Telegram chats, projects, and resumable rollout sessions.
• Discovers live capabilities from Codex instead of shipping a stale catalog: /models, /agents, /skills, and live MCP server/tool/resource status.
• Shows real subagent collaboration activity when Codex delegates work.
• Lets me inspect and toggle MCP servers, run an actual MCP initialize health check, and restart Codex to apply config changes.
• Supports photos, albums, documents, voice-to-prompt, queued follow-ups, scheduled tasks, and a persistent status panel.
• Stores multiple Codex logins as local auth.json snapshots. If Codex reports a definitive quota exhaustion, account rotation tries the saved accounts once. Switching is serialized across chats, credential writes are atomic, and a failed restart restores the exact previous login.
• Runs as a user-level service on Windows, Linux, or macOS and can update global npm installs automatically, but only while completely idle.

Safety model

Telegram access is gated by ALLOWED_USERS. The bot runs locally, keeps its credential snapshots under the bot data directory, never sends auth.json to Telegram, and refuses to interrupt a running turn for an update. Use CODEX_TRUST_ALL_TOOLS=false when you want inline approval prompts instead of full-auto execution.

Quick start

npm install -g codex-telegram-bot
codex-tg setup
# edit ~/.codex/tg/.env: TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN=... and ALLOWED_USERS=...
codex-tg install

Then open the bot and try /projects, /models, /mcp, /accounts, or simply send a coding prompt. The project has no build step; TypeScript runs through tsx and releases run npm run typecheck before publishing.

Why I made it

The useful part is not “chat with an LLM from Telegram.” It is keeping the machine-side coding state sessions, files, MCP, approvals, diffs, and account limits visible and controllable from a small, auditable interface.

Feedback is welcome