Build a client

The shortest credible Protocol client, worked end to end: an event viewer — it authenticates, handshakes, and renders one session's live event stream. Under 160 lines of Go (a fifth of them the doc comment), stdlib only: no Harbor import, no SDK, no generated code. That is the point of this page — the Protocol is the integration surface, and net/http + encoding/json is a complete toolkit for it.

Methods demonstrated: runtime.info, events.subscribe

The full source lives in the repository at examples/protocol-clients/event-viewer/ and is compile-gated by the project's preflight smoke — a wire-type or route change that breaks this client fails the build, so the listing below cannot rot.

Run it first

harbor dev &                                  # any Harbor Runtime works
go run ./examples/protocol-clients/event-viewer

Real output against a dev Runtime running one short task:

runtime harbor-dev-192.168.1.7 (build v0.0.0-dev) speaks Protocol 0.1.0
tailing session "event-viewer" — Ctrl-C to stop
     5  session.opened               run=                           {"SessionID":"event-viewer","OpenedAt":1781139747555658000}
     6  task.spawned                 run=                           {"TaskID":"01KTT37CQ3317D7DH8QRZC4YRZ","Kind":"foreground","ParentTaskID":"","Priority":0,"IdempotencyKey":""}
     7  task.started                 run=                           {"TaskID":"01KTT37CQ3317D7DH8QRZC4YRZ","PriorState":"pending"}
        llm.completion.chunk         run=01KTT37CQ3317D7DH8QRZC4YRZ {…,"Delta":"mock:User ","Done":false,"Kind":"content",…}
    15  planner.decision             run=01KTT37CQ3317D7DH8QRZC4YRZ {…,"DecisionKind":"Finish","Tool":"",…}
    16  task.completed               run=                           {"TaskID":"01KTT37CQ3317D7DH8QRZC4YRZ"}

The three moves

Every Protocol client makes the same three moves the event viewer makes; everything richer (a dashboard, a TUI, an intervention inbox) is these three plus rendering.

1. Get a token

A token authenticates who — (tenant, user) plus scopes; the conversation is chosen per-request via the X-Harbor-Session header (auth & identity). The event viewer takes HARBOR_TOKEN from the environment, falling back to the loopback-only dev bootstrap for the harbor dev case:

token := os.Getenv("HARBOR_TOKEN")
if token == "" {
    var boot struct {
        Token string `json:"token"`
    }
    mustPost(baseURL+"/v1/dev/bootstrap.json", "", "", []byte(`{}`), &boot)
    token = boot.Token
}

In production there is no bootstrap endpoint — your identity provider mints the JWT (or you self-issue with harbor token). The full setup — OIDC app registration, the claim shape harbor serve verifies, the iss/aud exact-match contract, and both attach on-ramps — is the production identity setup guide.

2. Handshake: runtime.info

Pin what you were built against; tolerate what you don't know (versioning & compatibility):

var info struct {
    InstanceID      string   `json:"instance_id"`
    BuildVersion    string   `json:"build_version"`
    ProtocolVersion string   `json:"protocol_version"`
    Capabilities    []string `json:"capabilities"`
}
mustPost(baseURL+"/v1/control/runtime.info", token, session, []byte(`{"identity":{}}`), &info)

const builtAgainstMajor = "0" // Protocol 0.x — same major ⇒ compatible
if strings.Split(info.ProtocolVersion, ".")[0] != builtAgainstMajor {
    fail("protocol major version skew: runtime speaks %s, this client was built against %s.x",
        info.ProtocolVersion, builtAgainstMajor)
}
capable := false
for _, c := range info.Capabilities {
    capable = capable || c == "events_subscribe"
}
if !capable {
    fail("this runtime does not advertise the events_subscribe capability")
}

Note what the struct does NOT declare: display_name, uptime_seconds, and any field a future minor adds. A partial decode that ignores unknown fields is the unknown-field tolerance rule, implemented for free by encoding/json.

3. Tail the stream

SSE is line-oriented; a bufio.Scanner is a complete SSE parser for this wire. Last-Event-ID: 0 replays the session's retained durable history before live-tailing (streaming semantics). Live llm.completion.chunk frames have no id: and may be missed across a reconnect; terminal task/answer state is authoritative:

req, err := http.NewRequest(http.MethodGet, baseURL+"/v1/events", nil)
if err != nil {
    fail("build events request: %v", err)
}
req.Header.Set("Authorization", "Bearer "+token)
req.Header.Set("X-Harbor-Session", session)
req.Header.Set("Last-Event-ID", "0")
resp, err := http.DefaultClient.Do(req)
// … status check …

scanner := bufio.NewScanner(resp.Body)
scanner.Buffer(make([]byte, 0, 64*1024), 1024*1024)
var eventType, id string
for scanner.Scan() {
    line := scanner.Text()
    switch {
    case strings.HasPrefix(line, "event: "):
        eventType = strings.TrimPrefix(line, "event: ")
    case strings.HasPrefix(line, "id: "):
        id = strings.TrimPrefix(line, "id: ")
    case strings.HasPrefix(line, "data: "):
        var frame struct {
            Run     string          `json:"run"`
            Payload json.RawMessage `json:"payload"`
        }
        data := strings.TrimPrefix(line, "data: ")
        if err := json.Unmarshal([]byte(data), &frame); err != nil {
            fail("malformed data frame: %v", err) // a broken frame is a wire bug — fail loud
        }
        fmt.Printf("%6s  %-28s run=%-26s %s\n", id, eventType, frame.Run, frame.Payload)
    }
}

The viewer keeps payload as json.RawMessage and prints it — it consumes the stream generically, which is why it survives event-catalog growth untouched. A client that branches on types decodes per-type shapes from the events reference inside that data: case.

What the teaching artifact deliberately leaves out, and what a production client adds: reconnect (remember the largest id:, reopen with Last-Event-ID on drop), re-snapshot on bus.dropped / stream.replay_unavailable, and a steering surface (start, cancel, the intervention verbs — all single POSTs; see task control and the pause model). The closing pseudocode in streaming semantics is the upgrade path.

The doors up

When the event viewer stops being enough, three reference points show the full pattern — read them, vendor from them:

1. The generated external-client TypeScript types module — examples/protocol-clients/event-viewer-ts/harbor-protocol.gen.ts in the Harbor repo, emitted by cmd/harbor-protocol-ts-types from the canonical Go single sources and drift-gated by make protocol-ts-types-gen-check. It is a self-contained, dependency-free module of TypeScript interfaces for every wire type plus HarborMethod / HarborErrorCode / HarborEventType string-union types and the pinned PROTOCOL_VERSION / WIRE_SURFACE_DIGEST constants — types only, no client logic. For a TypeScript client this is the door to start at: copy the one generated file and write your transport against it. The worked event-viewer-ts client consumes it against the dev runtime.
2. The Console's TypeScript client module — web/console/src/lib/protocol.ts in the Harbor repo: every wire type plus a typed HarborClient, the module the bundled Console runs on. It is hand-maintained in lockstep with the Go wire types and kept honest by the Console's own CI — vendor it when you want the typed transport, not just the types. The external-client types generator above partially retired the long-standing TS-generation deferral (D-269); the FULL Console-protocol.ts generator stays deferred (D-132). The generated ground truth for the types alone is the types reference, regenerated from the Go sources on every wire change.
3. The Console itself — the canonical full client: chat, fleet observation, the intervention queue, artifacts, topology. Everything it renders arrives through the same surface documented in this track; it holds no privileged access (RFC §5.1). When you wonder "how should a client consume X?", the Console's consumption of X is the worked answer.

The closing door: prove compatibility

When your client (or your own Runtime-side implementation of this contract) needs a compatibility claim stronger than "it works on my machine", the conformance certification page documents the suite Harbor itself is gated on, and exactly what a pass claims.