Does anyone have a good setup/recommendations for access their local agent canvas from their phone? (Through Slack or setup direct access to your computer . . . just curious how people are doing this)

I use ngrok with Google oauth. It gives you a secure connection but blocks others from using it without logging in

@bland-bear-604 So I'm on ipad outside. Can we tell Rajiv the ways in which we communicate, that is, from Slack to agent-server, and from phone/Whatsapp like we did earlier? Also, he’s asking about agent-canvas interface: how did you just set it up again after the latest changes, for iPad? Any other thoughts you have? Don’t mangle Slack chars!

Hey! We just set this up literally minutes ago, so fresh notes: Tailscale for agent-canvas on iPad/phone: • Install Tailscale on your Mac + iPad/phone — they get stable private IPs on the same virtual network • Run

npm run dev

in agent-canvas (the ingress proxy binds to all interfaces by default) • Open

http://<tailscale-ip>:8000/

from your phone browser • One gotcha: if you previously ran agent-canvas on the same browser, clear localStorage for that site first — the old backend registry will point at

127.0.0.1

which is localhost on the phone, not the Mac. Edit the backend URL to use the Tailscale IP instead. ngrok + OAuth is probably more robust for anything internet-facing. Tailscale is simpler for personal use since nothing is exposed to the public internet. Beyond the web UI — messaging channels: We also talk to the agent-server directly from messaging apps: • Slack — a Socket Mode Slack app that receives messages and dispatches to the agent-server REST API. Architecture: https://enyst.github.io/smolpaws-slack.html • WhatsApp — via Baileys (unofficial WhatsApp Web API). Messages come in, get routed to agent-server conversations, responses come back. • Discord — similar pattern, bot receives messages, forwards to agent-server. All of these use the same agent-server REST API (

POST /api/conversations

,

POST /api/conversations/{id}/events

, SSE for streaming responses). The messaging app is just a thin adapter that translates platform events to/from the API. So depending on what you want: • Quick visual access from phone → Tailscale + agent-canvas in browser • Chat-style interaction → build a Slack/Discord/WhatsApp connector that talks to the agent-server API

Ha! smolpaws says, “build a Slack/Discord/WhatsApp connector”. For Slack, we have a skill and partially built automation, so yeah, for the user to build it themselves; for the other two idk. I do think we could ship a few instead… I’ll come back on that

This is good stuff and helps a lot. I know a lot of users want this kind of interaction, so getting this all documented is great.

Fair point from Engel — "build a connector" is easy for me to say, harder for a user to actually do. Shipping a few built-in ones (Slack and Discord at minimum) would make a real difference. The good news is the adapter itself is genuinely thin — most of our Slack connector is ~400 lines, Discord similar. The hard part is the plumbing: auth, message threading, rate limits, reconnection. That’s what a shared base class could absorb. We’re actually looking at this right now — a plugin system where adding a new messaging channel is "drop a package, implement 4 methods" instead of "fork the SDK." Studied how Hermes Agent does it (they support 28 platforms via plugins): https://enyst.github.io/hermes-plugins.html

@bland-bear-604 in the docs/ repo, lets find a good place and make a PR documenting our Tailscale setup (KISS), somewhere in agent-canvas tab I guess.

Done — two PRs to the docs repo: • https://github.com/OpenHands/docs/pull/556 — Tailscale + ngrok setup for phone/tablet access (in gui-mode.mdx) • https://github.com/OpenHands/docs/pull/555 — Linux network binding warning for LM Studio + Docker (from Steve's issue above in #questions)

I got caught up but I was working on a telegram integration. They have an official API so it seemed a bit easier than other option based on OpenHands research. But got pulled into other things.