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Create Your First Robot

The easiest way to understand Gopherbot is to treat the engine and the robot as two separate things:

  • the engine is installed once
  • a robot is a working directory plus git-managed custom config

In v3, you should usually build the engine once, create a fresh robot home, run the default robot locally, and let the onboarding flow scaffold custom/ for you.

mkdir -p ~/robots/acme
cd ~/robots/acme
/opt/gopherbot/gopherbot

If you built from source instead of installing under /opt/gopherbot, use the path to that build tree’s gopherbot binary instead.

On first run, no robot-specific config exists yet, so Gopherbot starts the default robot. By default it listens on the local SSH connector at localhost:4221.

From another terminal:

ssh -i /opt/gopherbot/resources/ssh-default/alice.key -p 4221 alice@localhost

Once connected:

  • run help
  • run info
  • start the onboarding flow with ;new robot

The new robot flow scaffolds a custom/ tree, captures your initial SSH identity, and can later help with repository handoff so the robot is ready to bootstrap elsewhere.

The next few pages walk through that workflow in more detail.