Getting started¶

Install¶

The supported install is the signed linux/amd64 binary from the releases page. phpbotscout is an internal tool that happens to be open source; it is not built for macOS or Windows.

There is no released binary yet. No version has been tagged, so there is nothing on a releases page and nothing to download. Installing means building from source, on Linux, with Go 1.26 or newer and a C toolchain — the SQLite driver is the native one, under cgo.

From a checkout:

$ just build

which puts the binary in bin/. go install also works, and needs the build tag:

$ go install -tags sqlite_fts5 gitlab.com/phpboyscout/phpbotscout/cmd/phpbotscout@latest

With no tags, @latest resolves to the current commit on the default branch, and phpbotscout version reports a pseudo-version like v0.0.0-20260802151021-3eb67112ae53. That is expected.

Create a configuration file¶

Most commands refuse to run without one:

ERRO failed to load configuration: no config file found hints="Run 'phpbotscout init' to create a configuration."

Two ways to satisfy that:

$ phpbotscout init          # writes ~/.phpbotscout/config.yaml

or drop a .phpbotscout.yaml in the directory you are working in. Either is enough on its own. See where configuration is read from for which wins when both exist.

First run¶

$ phpbotscout --help

Fourteen commands, of which three are this tool's: serve, ask and index. The rest come from the framework — see the command reference.

What you can actually do with it¶

Two things, and it is worth knowing which before you start:

• Answer a question from the indexed documentation, at the command line, with citations. Start with answer your first question from the docs.
• Run the daemon, which watches Discord channels and keeps the index current. It does not post, answer or moderate in Discord — see run the bot.

Everything else the bot is designed to do is not built yet. What phpbotscout does not do is the honest list.

What you will need¶