Running AGNai Locally

Instead of using Agnai as an online service, you can run it locally on your machine. Before you try it, take the following into account:

  • You can use the online Agnai anonymously without being logged in, this way any data will be stored in your local browser memory. Anonymous users have their data saved to the browser’s local storage. Your data will “persist”, but not be shareable between devices or other browsers. Clearing your browser’s application data/cookies will delete this data.
  • You will run Agnai locally, but you will still need to connect to a remote AI service, unless you intend to run the AI model yourself.
  • Locally-hosted Agnai doesn’t give you access to Agnai models, even if you’re a subscriber (this might change in the future).

If you want to run Agnai locally, there are 3 different ways you can choose from:

  • Run Agnai in a docker container.
  • Install Agnai as an npm application.
  • Create a full development environment, if you want to make changes to the code and contribute to Agnai development.

Additional optional components:

  • MongoDB (recommended) - necessary to enable permanent storage for user data, characters, chats, etc. If it is not installed, Agnai will run in anonymous-only mode (see above).
  • Redis (not recommended) - necessary for multiple Agnai nodes to communicate with each other, not necessary in most cases.

    Installing in a Docker container

    If you’re familiar with running applications in Docker, this is probably the easiest way to install the application:

    1. Install Docker.
    2. Either clone the whole repository or download the self-host.docker-compose.yml file.
    3. Run the following command where the yml file is located: 
      docker compose -p agnai -f self-host.docker-compose.yml up -d

This will install the latest version of both Agnai and MongoDB inside the Docker container. You can access the application by opening http://localhost:3001 in your browser. You should be able to log in with the initial credentials: admin / password.

Updating the application

To update the application to the latest available version:

  1. Navigate to the directory where the yml file is located.
  2. Pull the latest version of the containers by running: 
    docker compose -f self-host.docker-compose.yml pull
  3. Restart the containers: 
    docker compose -p agnai -f self-host.docker-compose.yml up -d

    Installing the NPM package

    This will install Agnai as a global npm application. You will still need to manually install MongoDB if necessary.

  4. Install Node.js.
  5. Install MongoDB (this step is optional, but heavily recommended, see above).
  6. Either clone the whole repository or download the .env.template file.
  7. Rename the .env.template file to .env and open it in the editor. Change the parameters as needed, the most important ones are:
    • INITIAL_USER, INITIAL_PASSWORD will let you set the initial credentials to log in to the application for the first time.
    • DB_HOST, DB_PORT, DB_NAME - MongoDB database parameters.
  8. Install the dotenv-cli tool from npm - this tool will let you load variables from your .env file 
    npm install -g dotenv-cli
  9. Run the following command to install the application: 
    npm install agnai -g
  10. Run the application and pass the .env file: 
    dotenv -e .env agnai

    You can access the application by opening http://localhost:3001 in your browser.

You can also pass additional parameters to the application, to check the available parameters, run:

agnai --help

Updating the application

To update the application to the latest published version:

  1. Stop Agnai.
  2. Run the following command: 
    npm update -g agnai
  3. Start Agnai again.

    Development environment

    To create a full development environment for AGNai, please follow the directions in the README file in the repository.