Skip to content
Autonomous Engine Docs

Quickstart

This gets the stack running on one machine. Read Security before you expose it beyond localhost or point it at repositories that matter.

Before you start

  • Docker Desktop, or Docker Engine with Compose v2. Give Docker at least 16 GB of memory; the stack is about 25 containers.
  • git and openssl.
  • An LLM: an Ollama host is the default (a 30B-class coding model such as qwen2.5-coder:32b works), or an API key for a hosted provider.
  • Windows: clone into a short path, or run git config --global core.longpaths true first.

1. Clone and create .env

Terminal window
git clone https://github.com/Autonomous-Engine/autonomous-engine.git
cd autonomous-engine
cp .env.example .env

To run a specific release, check out its tag, for example git checkout v0.1.0.

2. Set three secrets

Edit .env and set these three values. The dashboard refuses to start with the placeholder JWT secret, and without a valid master key the engine cannot store credentials:

Terminal window
DB_PASSWORD=<output of: openssl rand -hex 16>
MASTER_ENCRYPTION_KEY=<output of: openssl rand -base64 32>
JWT_SECRET=<output of: openssl rand -hex 32>

DB_PASSWORD is placed inside DATABASE_URL, so avoid characters such as @, / and :. The hex output of openssl rand -hex 16 is safe.

Keep MASTER_ENCRYPTION_KEY somewhere safe. Every credential you store in the dashboard is encrypted with it; if you lose it, you have to enter them again.

3. Build

Building one image at a time keeps memory use down:

Terminal window
COMPOSE_PARALLEL_LIMIT=1 docker compose build

4. Start

Terminal window
docker compose up -d

On first start status-orchestrator applies the database migrations and creates the admin account admin@localhost with a random password. Read it from the log:

Terminal window
docker compose logs status-orchestrator | grep -A4 "FIRST-RUN ADMIN"

5. Sign in

Open the dashboard at http://localhost:32900, sign in as admin@localhost with that password, and set a new password when prompted.

The port comes from DASHBOARD_UI_PORT in .env.

The Autonomous Engine dashboard sign-in page with email and password fields.
Sample data The dashboard sign-in page.

6. Add an LLM and an embedding provider

  • Admin → Providers: add your LLM: your Ollama URL (the default suggestion is http://host.docker.internal:11434), or an API key for OpenAI or Anthropic.
  • Admin → Embeddings: add an embedding provider.

Until an embedding provider exists, knowledge-indexer logs that none is configured and restarts. That is expected.

The LLM Providers admin page with one local Ollama provider marked as default, its endpoint, a connected status and four installed models.
Sample data Admin → Providers with a local Ollama provider. No API key is needed for Ollama.

Next