Support Persistent Outbound Channels For Self-Hosted Deployments

[JohnCMcDonough]

I’ve been evaluating Eve for a self-hosted agent deployment and ran into a gap that seems worth discussing: support for persistent outbound channels, not just inbound HTTP / webhook-style channels.

In a self-hosted environment, you don't always want to expose a public endpoint to get events. The concrete use case for me is a connection from an agent running in a Docker container on a home server, to Discord.

With a persistent outbound connection, the agent can initiate and maintain the connection to the platform, receive messages/events over that connection, and reply back, without needing a public webhook endpoint or any inbound internet-facing route.

I was surprised this wasn't functionality supported by Eve out of the box, since it is supported using the chat-sdk (I thought required actually for Discord to receive messages?)

I know this is a fairly core change, but I believe that there's a number of platforms that support this model. Slack has a Socket Mode, Discord has their Gateway, Telegram has the getUpdates endpoint for polling.

I'm sure that you could use the Eve TypeScript client and Chat-SDK to bridge the gap, but that just seems like an extra step for people looking to get up and running quickly.

I think this would be a huge quality of life improvement for developers looking to test locally, as well as home-labbers looking to get something up and running without exposing a public endpoint.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post!