Appendix A: Protocols

Gopherbot communicates with users via different protocols, and extensions can modify their behavior and provide protocol-specific functionality based on values provided to the extension. For Go extensions, this is provided in the robot.Message struct provided by the GetMessage() method. For external scripts, this is provided in the GOPHER_PROTOCOL environment variable.

The design of Gopherbot is meant for mainly protocol-agnostic functionality. Running jobs and querying infrastructure should operate in much the same way whether the protocol is Slack or Terminal. However, some teams may wish to create protocol-specific extensions, and accept the risk of a more difficult transition should the team switch their primary chat platform.