Instant.bot Package Manager

Extend AI agents with tools, instantly

ibot is the official CLI for publishing Instant.bot packages. You can use this utility to publish new packages to the Instant.bot package registry, available at instant.bot/packages.

Instant.bot enables you to rapidly build custom chatbots and AI agents that can be extended with custom tools. It provides four major features;

1. Chat with and develop your agent in real time from the web
2. Extend your agent with hosted tool packages
3. Write your own private tool packages for your agents
4. Deploy your agent to third-party services like Discord and Slack

What is the Instant.bot Package Registry?

The Instant.bot Package Registry is a serverless hosting platform and registry for building tools that extend AI chatbots and agents.

Instant.bot packages are just REST API servers. Every package is an Instant API project, which is a simple way to export and auto-document JavaScript functions as REST endpoints that can be called via any HTTP client.

Authentication to your published packages are handled via API keychains which are delegated via Instant.bot.

NOTE: While in beta, only Instant.bot agents can use your published tools. We'll be opening up the gateway to programmatic access in the coming months.

Instant.bot Package vs. MCP

Reminder, Instant.bot packages are just REST API servers.

MCP, or Model Context Protocol, is a standard for passing tool and prompt context between AI models and service providers. Instant.bot packages are not MCP compatible out of the box, as they are simply REST APIs. However, it is our goal to add MCP bindings to the Instant API framework which powers all Instant.bot packages. When formalized, this will allow you to use Instant.bot packages with any MCP-compatible client or service provider. Contributors welcome!

Quickstart

Visit instant.bot/signup to register. Creating a new bot is easy, you can then use this CLI to develop and publish custom packages to extend your bots.

$ npm i ibot -g
$ mkdir new-project
$ cd new-project
$ ibot init  # initialize project in this directory
$ ibot login # log in to Instant.bot Package Registry with your Instant.bot account
$ ibot serve # run your tool package on a local server to test
$ ibot run / # test a single endpoint (like curl)
$ ibot up    # publish to development environment
$ ibot up --env staging    # publish to staging environment
$ ibot up --env production # publish to production environment

You can run ibot help at any time to see available commands.

Table of contents

1. How does Instant.bot work?
   1. How is hosting billed?
2. Building custom packages for your bots
   1. Initialize a project
      1. Defining tools aka endpoints
      2. Endpoint name, description, types
   2. Deploy an Instant.bot Package
      1. Public packages
      2. Private packages
3. Additional utilities
   1. Generate endpoints
   2. Generate tests
   3. Run tests
   4. Environment variables
4. Roadmap
5. Contact

How does Instant.bot work?

Instant.bot provides hosting for both (1) your agent and (2) your tool packages. Your agent is a chatbot that you can chat with directly via the Instant.bot web interface. Tool packages are REST APIs that can be used by your agent. You can publish tool packages for use by your agent and others or keep them private.

When you ask your agent a question that requires a tool call, Instant.bot will automatically route the request to the appropriate tool from the Instant.bot Package Registry and call the tool on your behalf.

How is hosting billed?

Model usage (generating responses) is a subscription-based service. However, for development purposes, you can use our lowest-tier model indefinitely in rate-limited mode on the free tier but only while on the web interface.

Tools cost money to run, and are billed as serverless functions at a rate of $0.50 of credits per 1,000 GB-s of usage. Credits are prepaid, and during our beta period all users get a one-time bonus of $1.00 in free usage credits.

GB-s represents a "gigabyte-second" and is calculated by the function RAM × execution time. For example, a function with 512 MB (0.5 GB) of RAM running for 200ms would use:

• Used GB-s = 0.5GB × 0.2s = 0.1 GB-s
• Used credits = $0.50 / 1,000 GB-s × 0.1 GB-s = $0.00005

Building custom packages for your bots

Building bots on Instant.bot is straightforward. Extending with custom tool packages can be done online via the web interface, or if you prefer working with your own editor, you can use this CLI.

Initialize a project

To initialize a new Instant.bot package:

$ npm i ibot -g
$ mkdir new-project
$ cd new-project
$ ibot init

You'll be walked through the process. The ibot CLI will automatically check for updates to core packages, so make sure you update when available. To play around with your Instant.bot package locally;

$ ibot serve

Will start an HTTP server. To execute a standalone endpoint / tool:

$ ibot run /

Defining tools aka endpoints

Defining custom tools is easy. You'll find the terms tool and endpoint used interchangeably as they all refer to the same thing: your bot executing custom code in the cloud.

A tool is just an endpoint hosted by the Instant.bot Package Registry.

All endpoints for Instant.bot packages live in the functions/ directory. Each file name maps to the endpoint route e.g. functions/hello.js routes to localhost:8000/hello. You can export custom GET, POST, PUT and DELETE functions from every file. Here's an example "hello world" endpoint:

// functions/hello.js

/**
 * A basic hello world function
 * @param {string} name Your name
 * @returns {string} message The return message
 */
export async function GET (name = 'world') {
  return `hello ${name}`!
};

You can write any code you want and install any NPM packages you'd like to your tool package.

Endpoint name, description, types

Using the comment block above every exported method (e.g. GET) you can define your endpoint. Instant.bot packages use an open source specification called Instant API to export JavaScript functions as type safe web APIs. You can learn more about how to properly define and document the shape (parameters) of your API there.

Deploy an Instant.bot Package

Public packages

NOTE: You will not be charged for other people using your public actions. They are billed directly from their account.

By default all packages are created as public projects. Public projects are namespaced to your username, e.g. @my-username/project. This can be found in the "name" field of instant.package.json.

Note that the code for public projects will be shared publicly for anybody to see, and the expectation is that others can use this code in their bots as well. they will be billed from their balance.

To deploy a public project to a development environment, you can use:

$ ibot up

You can also publish to staging and production using:

$ ibot up --env staging
$ ibot up --env production

Private packages

NOTE: You WILL be charged by anybody accessing your private packages. However, all code and endpoints will not be publicly available; you must share the URL with somebody in order for them to use it.

You can publish private project by prepending private/ on the "name" field in instant.package.json, e.g.

{
  "name": "private/@my-username/private-package"
}

You then deploy as normal. These packages will be visible by you in the registry but nobody else.

Additional utilities

There are a few additional utilities you may find useful with this package;

Generate endpoints

# generates functions/my-endpoint/example.js
$ ibot g:endpoint my-endpoint/example

Generate tests

# Generate blank tests or ones for an endpoint
$ ibot g:test my_test # OR ...
$ ibot g:test --endpoint my-endpoint/example

Run tests

You can write tests for your tools to verify they work. Simply run;

$ ibot test

And voila!

Environment variables

You can store environment variables with your packages in;

.env
.env.production
.env.staging

These files will not be published for everybody to see, so you can use them to hide secrets within your code. However, be careful when using environment variables with public packages: if you ever return them in an endpoint response, or connect to sensitive data, there's a chance you may expose that information to another user of the platform.

Roadmap

There's a lot to build! Instant.bot is still in early beta. Coming soon;

• Deploy to Slack
• Uploading image support
• Knowledge bases
• Much more!

Submit requests via Discord at discord.gg/instant!

Contact

The best place for help and support is Discord at discord.gg/instant, but feel free to bookmark all of these links.

Destination	Link
Instant.bot	instant.bot
GitHub	github.com/instantbots
Discord	discord.gg/instant
X / instantbots	x.com/instantbots
X / Keith Horwood	x.com/keithwhor