hermes-agent/plugins/platforms/photon/sidecar

Photon sidecar

Small Node helper that bridges Hermes Agent to Photon's Spectrum SDK (spectrum-ts). Hermes is Python; Photon has no public HTTP send-message endpoint today; replies therefore go through this sidecar.

The sidecar:

• runs Spectrum({ projectId, projectSecret, providers: [imessage.config()] })
• exposes a loopback-only HTTP control channel for the Python adapter to push send/typing requests (auth via X-Hermes-Sidecar-Token)
• drains the inbound message stream so spectrum-ts keeps its reconnect/heartbeat machinery alive (real inbound delivery is via Photon's signed webhook hitting our Python aiohttp server)

Install

cd plugins/platforms/photon/sidecar
npm install

The Hermes plugin's hermes photon setup command runs npm install here automatically.

Run standalone

For debugging:

PHOTON_PROJECT_ID=... PHOTON_PROJECT_SECRET=... \
PHOTON_SIDECAR_PORT=8789 PHOTON_SIDECAR_TOKEN=$(openssl rand -hex 16) \
node index.mjs

In normal use, the Python adapter supervises this process — start, restart on crash, kill on shutdown — and never asks the user to run it by hand.

Why a sidecar at all?

Photon publishes webhooks (inbound) but their docs state explicitly:

Pass space.id to Space.send(...) from a separate spectrum-ts SDK instance to reply. No public HTTP send endpoint exists today.

— https://photon.codes/docs/webhooks/events

When Photon ships an HTTP send endpoint, the plan is to retire this sidecar entirely and call it directly from Python. The plugin's outbound code path is already isolated behind a single helper (_sidecar_send in adapter.py) to make that swap a one-file change.