Adding the bot to Matrix server

I have my own matrix server for my own use. Usually it is used by me a bit by my family and most of it by my own services to sent me some notifications.

Lately I started playing with nanobot. It is personal AI assistant like OpenClaw. I wanted to be able to chat with it in my own Matrix via my own phone. To do that I needed to create new user dedicated

I find it a bit confusing that there is no central web UI that allow you to do that. Ok, since privacy and security is their utmost concern maybe there did it like that so that you have to have direct control of the server that is running it. OK that is one way to do it securely but also it is a bit obscure. You have to remember where it is, how docker container is named (there are several) and remember exact command you have for run, with exact name of parameters. Since it is very rare occurrence having a need to do that (it is not like I am constantly changing users), I have a hard time to remember that.

I created snippet of bash script that need to be run in order to do that. I have matrix running on docker compose with separate directory for all the data.

# navigate to directory
cd /opt/matrix
sudo docker compose exec matrix-synapse /bin/bash
register_new_matrix_user -u newusername -p very-secure-password1 -c /data/homeserver.yaml

This creates the user. In order to connect to server as new user you still need to login. In theory it should be possible to do that via web client and extract device id and access token from the client itself. It is possible and might actually work. But it is also possible to do that via API and it is much better since you can easily regenrate that data. And you will probably need that since token that is in use will be active but if user will not be active via that token for some time it will be invalidated. And then using client will be much more inconvenient then just API call via curl for example.

Here is another bash script that retrieves access token via API:

curl -XPOST -d '{"type":"m.login.password", "user":"newusername", "password":"very-secure-password1"}' "https://matrix.domain/_matrix/client/r0/login"

Of course user name and its password need to be the same as in previous script.

This will return JSON similar to:

{
    "access_token": "QGV4YW1wbGU6bG9jYWxob3N0.vRDLTgxefmKWQEtgGd",
    "home_server": "localhost",
    "user_id": "@matrix.domain:newusername"
}

That is all. Though I am not sure how device id need to be retrieved/regenerated without some client. Or even if it need to be communicated to the server at all prior to login. Anyway one time login via client and retrieving device id from the client it is enough. I won’t change and access token can be changed via running a script again fairly easily.

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