The essence of Hermes Agent's allowed users is gateway access whitelisting. As long as the bot is exposed to portals such as Telegram, Slack, Email, and WhatsApp, it should be prioritized with allowlists rather than opening ALLOW_ALL at once.
How to understand this set of restrictions
- Global Limits:
GATEWAY_ALLOWED_USERS, suitable for a unified set of controls. - Platform Restrictions: e.g.
TELEGRAM_ALLOWED_USERS,SLACK_ALLOWED_USERS,EMAIL_ALLOWED_USERS. - The platform's own user ID is different: Telegram/Discord is usually a numerical ID, Email is an email address, and Matrix is a full user ID.
Recommended practice
- Only put your own account for testing.
- After confirming that the conversation, tool call, and attachment are all normal, gradually add a second and third user.
- In the group chat scenario, don't just open a full interview just because you want to save trouble.
When can you fill in the allowlist without having to fill it out by hand?
If you don't want to manually find the user ID of each platform, you can use DM pairing. That is, the unfamiliar user first receives a one-time matching code, and you manually approve it before releasing it. But this does not mean that there is no need to do permission design, it just replaces "write the list in advance" with "approval after receiving the application".
In a word: Hermes Agent's allowed users should be considered a required item by default, especially if the bot has terminals and file tools.
Official open source address: https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent; Official document entry: https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/.
