Advanced Setup

The advanced steps below are intended for people with sysadmin experience. If you are not comfortable with these steps, please refer to the basic setup guide.

Introduction

For the advanced setup, first follow the basic setup guide to get the server up and running. Once you have the server running, you can follow the steps below to configure the server for your specific needs.

Configuration

Setting config via environment variables

The server uses environment variables to store configs. You can set these environment variables in a .env file in the root of the project. The .env file should look like this:

# .env
KEY1=value1
KEY2=value2

The server will automatically load the .env file when it starts. You can also set the environment variables directly in your shell. Refer to your operating system's documentation on how to set environment variables in the current session.

The valid options are listed in .env.example in the root of the builder and server directories. You can copy the .env.example file to .env and modify the values as needed.

# Copy the .env.example file to .env
cp .env.example .env

Secrets directory

The secret directory is located at ./secrets. You can store any secrets you need in this directory. The server will automatically load the secrets when it starts.

An example for a secret called my_secret would look like this:

# ./secrets/my_secret
my_secret_value

This is useful when running on docker so you can copy the secrets into the container without exposing them in the Dockerfile.

Database selection

SQLite

By default, the server uses SQLite as the database. SQLite is a file-based database that is easy to set up and use. However, it is not recommended for production usecases where auth is required because that subsystem requires Postgres.

PostgreSQL

For production use, it is recommended to use PostgreSQL as the database. You will swap the commands you use to generate and run prisma to the following

poetry run prisma generate --schema postgres/schema.prisma

This will generate the Prisma client for PostgreSQL. You will also need to run the PostgreSQL database in a separate container. You can use the docker-compose.yml file in the rnd directory to run the PostgreSQL database.

cd rnd/
docker compose up -d

You can then run the migrations from the autogpt_server directory.

cd ../autogpt_server
prisma migrate dev --schema postgres/schema.prisma