Skip to main content
Channel Manager is the link between Hiro Server and the outside communication surfaces: device nodes through Hiro Gate, and other channel integrations through channel plugins. The Channel Manager is the Hiro Server component that owns channel plugins. It starts enabled plugins, accepts their local WebSocket connections, and moves messages between plugins and the rest of the server. Channel Plugins include WhatsApp, Telegram, and other channel integrations. Learn more about channel plugins in the Channel Plugins section. The Channel Manager handles two types of messages, Messages and Events.
  • channel.receive — inbound UnifiedMessages from plugins
  • channel.send — outbound UnifiedMessages to plugins
  • channel.event — infrastructure events from plugins

​
Responsibilities

Plugin spawning — On startup, the Channel Manager reads all enabled ChannelConfig entries from the workspace database and spawns one subprocess per channel. Connection handling — Plugins connect back over WebSocket using JSON-RPC 2.0. The Channel Manager accepts these connections and dispatches each incoming message by its method field. Inbound routing — channel.receive notifications from plugins are forwarded to the on_message callback, which is the Communication Manager’s receive() method. Event routing — channel.event notifications (such as gateway_connected or pairing_request) are forwarded to the on_event callback, which is handled directly in the server process for pairing logic. Outbound dispatch — The Communication Manager calls send_to_channel() or broadcast() to push messages back to one or all connected plugins. Graceful shutdown — On stop, the Channel Manager sends a channel.stop notification to each connected plugin, waits one second, then terminates any subprocesses that are still running.

​
Event handlers

​
ChannelEventHandler

A small dispatcher that maps channel-event names (e.g. pairing_request, gateway_connected, device_connected) to registered async handlers. Channel Manager forwards every inbound channel.event to it; unknown events are logged and dropped.

​
InfraEventHandlers

The concrete handlers registered on ChannelEventHandler. They implement the infrastructure-level reactions to plugin events: validating pairing requests and minting device attestations, tracking gateway up/down state, and updating the live recipient list when devices connect or disconnect. These responsibilities live here — not in Channel Manager — because they are security and state-management concerns rather than transport. Inbound infrastructure events These are channel.event notifications emitted by channel plugins and dispatched by ChannelEventHandler to InfraEventHandlers. Outbound infrastructure events These are server-to-plugin channel.event notifications sent through ChannelManager. They go directly from InfraEventHandlers to the devices channel plugin.

​
CommunicationManager

The message router that sits between Channel Manager and the application core. It validates inbound messages, applies permissions, runs the adapter pipeline (transcription, persistence, …), and decides where each message goes (chat, agent, transcript, outbound queue). Channel Manager is its inbound source and its outbound sink, but every routing and policy decision is made here. See Communication Manager.

​
Channel plugins

The subprocesses Channel Manager spawns and talks to. Each plugin is a standalone Python package implementing the contract from hiro-channel-sdk. The built-in devices plugin is the bridge to Hiro Gate; optional plugins such as Telegram and WhatsApp follow the same shape. See Channel Plugins.

​
Workspace DB (channel_plugins table)

The source of truth for which channels are enabled, how to launch them, and what configuration to push after registration. Channel Manager reads this on startup; it does not write it.

​
Read-only consumers

MetricsCollector, the Admin API, and the HTTP surface query Channel Manager for connected-plugin metadata and child-process info. They observe state; they do not drive the component.

​
See also

Channel Plugins

Wire protocol, JSON-RPC methods, plugin lifecycle, and the SDK contract.

Communication Manager

The router that makes inbound and outbound decisions across channels and the core.

UnifiedMessage reference

The shared wire contract for UnifiedMessage payloads and gateway frames.