add-channel

Channel skills

A channel is how your owner talks to you. Besides the built-in ones (terminal, Telegram) any skill directory that contains a channel.json is a channel: the core starts its program (the bridge) as a child process and talks to it over stdin/stdout. You can add a new interface for yourself by writing one — no core changes, no container restart.

The bridge only moves messages. The core does everything else: it renders status updates, answers, buttons and long-message splitting, runs the slash commands, and checks that every message comes from the owner.

Layout

/data/skills/<name>/
  SKILL.md       what the channel is, how to set it up, quirks you learned
  channel.json   manifest (below)
  bridge.py      the bridge program (any language; python3 stdlib is safest)

<name> is the channel name (lowercase, hyphens).

channel.json

{
  "command": ["python3", "bridge.py"],
  "requires_env": ["DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN"],
  "owner_env": "DISCORD_OWNER_ID",
  "format": "markdown",
  "max_message_len": 2000,
  "can_edit": true,
  "buttons": false,
  "enabled": true
}

• command — run from the skill directory. Required.
• requires_env — env vars that must be set; until then the channel stays idle (missing_env), not failed. Env vars come from the container (docker run -e ...), so ask the owner to add secrets there; never write tokens into the skill files.
• owner / owner_env — the owner's user ID on that platform (literal, or the env var holding it). One is required. Messages whose sender differs are dropped by the core.
• format — how the platform shows text: markdown (sent as-is, default), plain (markdown flattened), telegram_html.
• max_message_len — longer answers are split. Default 4000.
• can_edit — the platform can edit and delete sent messages: enables the live status message ("🔧 Running: go build..."). Without it the core only sends typing.
• buttons — ask requests show options as buttons whose value comes back as the reply. Without it the core lists the options as text.
• enabled — false keeps the skill without running it.