Terminology

This section is the vocabulary for the rest of the manual.

• Gopherbot: the engine installation or source tree that contains the binary, built-in defaults, libraries, stock plugins, and robot skeleton.
• robot: a configured running instance of Gopherbot for one team or one purpose.
• Robot: the API object passed to plugin, job, and task handlers.
• install tree: the directory that contains the gopherbot executable plus shipped conf/, lib/, resources/, plugins/, jobs/, tasks/, and robot.skel/.
• robot home: the working directory where you launch the engine for one robot. In practice this is the directory that may contain .env, .setup-state, workspace/, and custom/.
• custom config: the robot-specific overlay under custom/. Installed defaults load first, then custom/conf/... overrides them.
• default robot: the built-in demo robot you get when no custom repository or custom config has been loaded yet. By default this robot is named floyd.
• bootstrap: the startup path where Gopherbot has enough environment to know which robot repository it should clone, but does not have the robot’s config on disk yet.
• plugin: interactive automation triggered by chat messages.
• job: scheduled or triggered automation that usually assembles a pipeline of tasks.
• task: a reusable unit of work inside a pipeline. Some tasks are stock and included with the engine; others are custom.
• pipeline: the ordered execution chain built by a plugin or job.
• primary protocol: the connector that provides the robot’s main runtime identity and default message context.
• secondary protocol: any additional connector enabled alongside the primary one.
• UserRoster: the global user directory for the robot. Identity and authorization decisions are username-based.
• ProtocolConfig: the connector-local configuration block loaded from conf/protocols/<protocol>.yaml.
• BasicMarkdown: the default cross-protocol outgoing message format in v3.
• parameter: a name/value setting attached to a task, plugin, job, or namespace. Secure parameters may need to be retrieved through the Robot API instead of plain environment variables.
• namespace: a reusable group of parameters shared across related automation.
• environment file: .env or private/environment, loaded early at startup. This is where deployment-specific settings such as GOPHER_ENVIRONMENT, GOPHER_CUSTOM_REPOSITORY, or secrets usually live.

You will also see these names throughout the docs:

• Floyd: the name of the shipped default robot.
• Clu: the long-running development robot used while building v3.
• robot.skel: the standard starting point for a new robot repository.