Dear team, I’m a very concerned that the OpenHands team (now a company) may be moving in a direction that affects support for self-hosted deployment - that is, the ability to run OpenHands on our own servers in a standard way (not just localhost, without exposing non-standard ports, etc). Because of this, I would really appreciate any official clarification or statement on the current and future stance regarding self-hosting OpenHands. As you know, being an open-source project, the community naturally values the ability to run and maintain the software independently. If there are changes that limit this in favor of commercial priorities, it’s likely that the community will continue exploring alternatives, such as maintaining a fork that preserves self-hosting support. Please answer directly here, since not everyone is here on Slack: https://github.com/OpenHands/OpenHands/issues/13827

Official response from CEO: https://github.com/OpenHands/OpenHands/issues/13827#issuecomment-4214711148

Thanks for raising this Christopher! Glad to hear we're on the same page 🙂

Thanks Robert

This was my first experience with OH, I downloaded it and installed it in a vm on my promox to test it out. I connected to it from my office host via the browser and had the issues of the sandbox not working. I finally gave up after much frustration and trying different hacks. I posted about this and a few devs responded to me and a few others on github that this was a known issue and the way to fix it without a bunch of rules was to implement a reverse proxy server inside OH and it was being worked on. Has this been done yet. I don't want to try it again if it's not working. I can't run OH locally and even if I could I still rather have a remote headless server for it to run on and to use it on my desktop computer with the big monitors.

Hi Neal, thanks for the feedback. Just to understand your situation better - let me confirm I understand (also CC @hundreds-twilight-32833, @chilly-france-44439 who I was having convos about this) • You can't run OpenHands locally, so you need to run it in a VM • It would preferable if you could run OpenHands without requiring docker - that is, get the frontend Web GUI to render inside a VM, without requiring docker, so you can use OpenHands from within that VM • You also prefer to have the OpenHands agent operate in a remote agent server - e.g., that server may existing outside the VM but is reachable by the VM Let me know if I got any of this wrong though!

Just to chime in as a relative novice in virtualization, that I found the installation and setup process painless and smooth. I've installed the OH CLI inside fairly uncommon environment (a virtual env from the VS Code terminal but VS Code is actually Code Server running headless inside a Coder managed VM), I have also setup the Web UI stack via docker containers, both manually with docker compose and from portainer and both instances went up without a hitch. Not to say the points above are invalid, just that others like myself have had a different experience

@worried-salesclerk-85726 The OH Web UI currently only works from localhost. If you try to run it on your server and connect from a browser on other computer, it won't work. It was working fine in previous versions. I implemented a router inside OpenHands to make it work again. It works for some services, but not for all. My PR is on github.

@better-monitor-61654, Ah, i see, that would explain why it worked well for me. Even on the same LAN it still won't work?

OpenHands V1 will not work out of the box if you try to access the web UI from another computer, even on the same LAN.