Hey all! We'd love to understand what might keep you from using Agent Canvas. Please share here so we know how to improve Agent Canvas to make it a great daily driver.

My biggest barrier to using agent-canvas right now is two: 1. I'm not used to starting it up yet a. On my local computer sandboxing is a little annoying, i either need to run docker and have it separated from my system or have it potentially be a little unsafe b. I have a VM that i'd like to run it on, but it needs to be able to be locked down with a session API key, which is not quite implemented yet 2. It's not integrated into slack, github, etc. where i often launch agents on the cloud I'm working on fixing 1b. 2 will be improved when we have better support for intergrations

I believe canvas is always locked down with session api key thonk (for 1b)

canvas is indeed locked down w/ session API key! just don't use the auto-generated one, which gets plumbed into the frontend

To clarify: 1. I want to have a frontend that I can access from anywhere without booting it up because I do a lot of work on my phone. I can run an agent server on the cloud, but not the frontend easily at the moment because the frontend is unauthenticated. I just added some stuff to make it easier to not plumb the session API key in automatically if you run npm run dev, but i haven't tested it yet. 2. For connecting the canvas to app.all-hands.dev, I don't know why I'd want to do that instead of just using the frontend on app.all-hands.dev?

the frontend is unauthenticated

yeah but it can't do anything without a SESSION_API_KEY!

for running the frontend separately from the backend there's no README about this so I didn't think of it honestly. but i think the solution of preventing the plumbing should work. it just uncovered some other bugs that need to be squashed, not a big deal. for running on app.all-hands.dev, i can just do everything there honestly, no need to switch between local and cloud. but i'm trying to do this locally to simulate the case where people want to run locally. and when i run locally i had trouble with integrations.

local integrations (e.g. triggering a convo on your laptop/VM from Slack) will be really hard, but we're working on it!

Hey Graham, what would your ideal install flow be? I realize your answer may be different from the general publics but curious 🙂

probably something like the following:

npm install @OpenHands/agent-canvas
agent-canvas --protect-with-session-api-key

Cool! I think npm install could be a good starting point. CC @hundreds-twilight-32833 @wooden-umbrella-84098 maybe we do this over a random bash script

That would be pretty good. I've been struggling today to get multiple local backends up and running the way I want and each in their own container. Being able to have the built in support and all working together would be ideal. QQ: How well supported is npm on a deployed server? I've done it for javascripty projects but will it just...work with the whole python server?

allegedly yes we can ship python in npm, @quick-window-91705 I believe was working with this

Yep that's already done as of today you can launch the canvas via

npx @openhands/agent-canvas@alpha

as an example of that

awesome, so if we have some good command line arguments we might actually be pretty good

https://github.com/OpenHands/agent-canvas/issues/226 I opened this issue to consolidate the dev scripts, if someone can also add comments on the CLI launch options you'd like and I can add support for them

added my favorites!