The protocols business automation actually runs on.
Plus the escape hatch for the rest.
Business automation at the protocol layer is still mostly FTP, SFTP, SSH, HTTP, and containers. InTouch ships first-class tools for each — with credential vault, retries, audit, and RBAC built in. For anything else, the spawn tool invokes arbitrary CLIs with captured stdout/stderr and exit-code handling.
The Protocols, Plus the Escape Hatch
FTP / FTPS
Passive/active modes, TLS support, per-file and directory operations. Get, put, list, rename, delete. Output file lists for downstream tools.
SFTP
Password, key, or key-with-passphrase auth. Known-hosts verification. Recursive ops. The partner integration workhorse.
SSH
Remote exec with stdout/stderr capture. Tunnel establishment for downstream tools that need to reach a private host. sudo support with credential-vaulted passwords.
HTTP / REST
GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, PATCH. JSON body templating with property interpolation. Response-to-property extraction via JSONPath. Retries on 5xx, configurable backoff.
Docker
Run any container as a tool. Volume mounts, env vars, network, entrypoint override. Captures exit code and streams. The best answer when the right tool ships as a container image.
Spawn
Invoke any CLI on the server host with argv, env, working directory, and stdin. Capture exit code, stdout, stderr. The escape hatch for "I just need to run this one command on a schedule."
Runtime Environment
Defines a reusable execution context for spawn tools: the command, env vars, working directory. Gives shell and cmd.exe wrappers for cross-platform command scheduling.
File Management
Copy, move, delete, create directories, check existence. The glue between tools that produce files and tools that consume them.
Why Protocol Tools Matter
Partner Integrations
Most B2B integrations are still SFTP drops and HTTP REST. The tools handle the boring: retries, credential rotation, idempotency. You handle the business logic.
System Automation
SSH into a fleet, run a command, capture output, branch on exit code. Log rotation, cache purges, smoke tests. Same ergonomics whether the fleet is five hosts or five thousand.
Container-Native Tools
Anything that ships as a container — dbt, Great Expectations, custom ML inference — runs as a Docker tool. Exit code is the success signal, stdout is the data payload.
The Long Tail
The spawn tool covers the rest. That internal tool someone's brother-in-law wrote in Go? Runs under spawn. The PowerShell script the Windows admin swears by? Runs under spawn with cmd.exe /c. No need for a plugin; you just need the binary on the server.
Protocols That Keep Working
Every protocol tool is in every edition. Start free.