What is rasptele?

Rasptele is a private control system that lets you monitor and manage a Raspberry Pi running Docker containers entirely through Telegram, without opening any inbound network port on the device. It gives one trusted Telegram account a narrow set of commands to check on the health of the Pi and its containers, and it works by having the Pi reach out to Telegram itself rather than waiting for anyone to connect to it. Through Telegram commands, you can see the Pi's CPU, memory, disk space, temperature, and whether it is being throttled, along with the health of its Docker containers. You can list containers and restart only ones that have been explicitly allowed in advance, and only after confirming the action. If you also run Pi-hole, a network ad blocking tool, on the same network, Rasptele can show its statistics and let you temporarily pause or immediately restore its blocking. The system also sends alerts if the host, a container, its own internal safety component, or Pi-hole runs into trouble, and it keeps retrying any notification that failed to send using a small local database, so alerts are not silently lost. A record of recent incidents and actions is kept for review. Support for other tools like qBittorrent, Jellyfin, Coolify, and OpenWrt is mentioned as not yet built. Setting it up involves creating a Telegram bot, finding your personal Telegram numeric ID, downloading a specific tagged release of the project, filling in your bot token and ID into a settings file, and starting it with Docker Compose. Pi-hole support is optional and enabled by adding two more settings once you have it running. The system deliberately keeps the component that touches the Docker socket separate from the bot itself, limiting it to a small set of allowed actions, and mounts the host's files as read only where possible, though the author notes these mounts can still expose some sensitive information to the bot's container. The project recommends running it only on a dedicated, trusted Raspberry Pi that is never exposed directly to the internet, and it is released under the Apache License 2.0.