Deploying to Vercel

You can use any hosting provider that supports Node.js applications, but for simplicity we’re going to use Vercel , as it requires minimal effort to deploy the app for a quick demo. We’re going to set up two Vercel integrations: Neon  for Postgres/PGVector database hosting and Redis  for Redis hosting. Neon is used as the main database, while Redis is used as a database event bus for real-time features described in the Polling article, and as temporary storage for messages consumed by the demo Telegram bot.

Note: Vovk.ts is not affiliated with Vercel, Telegram, or Neon in any way.

To deploy the app with this setup, create a new project in Vercel, link it to a fork of the GitHub repository, and add the integrations mentioned above (both are available on the free plan).

Add OPENAI_API_KEY to the project environment variables. Other variables such as DATABASE_URL and REDIS_URL are created automatically by the integrations.

It’s also recommended to add a PASSWORD variable to enable simple (and free) password protection for the app. You can set it to any desired value.

For MCP protection, you can also add the MCP_ACCESS_KEY variable to enable basic authorization for the MCP server using the ?mcp_access_key=your_key query param. If this variable is not set, no authorization is required.

Finally, for Telegram bot integration, you can add the TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN variable if you want to use the Telegram bot feature. See the Telegram integration article for more details.

If you run into issues, check the .env.template  file for reference.