TencentCloud/Octop

A smarter, self-hosted AI assistant — multi-user, multi-agent.

Highlights · Overview · Core Technology · Features · Roadmap · Quick Start · Contents

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Octop is an open-source, self-hosted AI assistant. It's not just a tool — it's a digital life form that can operate in parallel. Through its multi-agent architecture, it builds an intelligent environment that is both independent and collaborative for teams, families, and individuals. Best of all, it runs entirely on your machine — the fully self-hosted design means privacy is never a compromise, while single-process startup makes the powerful web console, CLI, and IM integrations readily accessible.

Chat through the Web Dashboard, Feishu, DingTalk, QQ, Discord, WeCom, or programmatic HTTP/SSE/WebSocket. Extend capabilities with the expert library, Connectors (OAuth + MCP), and ACP integration for IDE workflows.

✨ Highlights

| | Feature | Description | |---|---------|-------------| | 👥 | Multi-user expert team | One admin, shared household; built-in expert library — switch specialists per scenario | | 🎭 | MBTI personas | 16 personality templates plus an interactive quiz — give each agent a distinct character | | 🔒 | Security built-in | JWT multi-user isolation, tool approval, shell command guardrails, and PII redaction — data stays local | | 🔌 | Connector ecosystem | Tencent suite (Docs, Weibo trends, News, …); OAuth and MCP gateway extend resource boundaries | | 💾 | Pluggable backends | Local disk, Docker containers, PostgreSQL, or COS/S3 — AI operates inside isolated boundaries | | 🧠 | Portable memory | Powered by harness-memory; memory migrates with the workspace | | 📚 | Knowledge base | RAG over your documents; semantic retrieval grounds agent answers in your private corpus | | 🧩 | Plugins | Extend Octop with third-party plugins; bundled plugins are seeded and toggled on demand | | ↔️ | ACP bidirectional | octop acp for IDE/terminal AI; delegate to OpenCode / Claude Code with permission gates | | 💻 | Terminal AI+ | Interactive shell in the browser — AI-assisted command execution and troubleshooting | | 🌐 | Browser AI+ | Headless Chromium sessions for web automation, screenshots, and remote browsing | | 🖥️ | Remote desktop | Live screen and input from the dashboard on Linux, Windows, and macOS — remote office work and GUI apps; one-click isolated desktop on headless Linux | | 🏠 | Self-hosted | Dashboard, CLI, IM channels, and cron in one octop run — all data under ~/.octop/ |

📌 Overview

Octop is a self-hosted AI assistant platform for households and small teams. It runs a single process that serves a web dashboard, a CLI, IM channels (Feishu, DingTalk, QQ, Discord, WeCom, and more), and cron automation — all sharing one control-plane database under ~/.octop/ (SQLite by default; PostgreSQL optional).

Octop's design goal: keep every conversation, workspace, and credential on your own machine, while giving each user a personal team of specialized agents they can switch between per task.

🧠 Core Technology

| Layer | Technology | |-------|-----------| | Language | Python 3.12+ | | Web framework | FastAPI + uvicorn | | Agent runtime | harness-agent | | Gateway | harness-gateway | | Control plane DB | SQLite (WAL, default) or PostgreSQL (optional) | | Frontend | React 18 + TypeScript + Vite + Ant Design | | Scheduling | APScheduler | | ACP | agent-client-protocol | | Build / quality | hatchling · ruff · mypy · pytest |

Octop is built on the Harness stack — a set of focused runtimes that Octop composes into one process:

• harness-agent — Agent runtime: model routing, tools, skills, and conversation checkpointing.
• harness-gateway — multi-platform IM channel bridge that normalizes incoming messages into a single processing pipeline.
• harness-memory — hierarchical recall with full-text search, so an agent's memory travels with its workspace.
• harness-browser — CDP-based browser automation with persistent profiles for web tasks.

🤔 Features

Server & auth

• Multi-user JWT authentication with admin role
• First-run setup wizard (octop init)
• Interactive API docs at /api/docs (off by default — set "enable_api_docs": true in config.json to enable)

Agents

• Multiple agents per user; each has its own workspace, providers, channels, and cron
• 16 MBTI persona templates + custom system prompt
• Expert library scanned at boot (infra/agents/experts/library/)
• Workspace backends: local disk, COS, S3, and other remote stores

Channels & automation

• IM channels: Feishu, DingTalk, QQ, Discord, WeCom, and more
• Proactive cron jobs with natural-language and slash-command triggers
• Unified message processing across Web UI, IM, and cron surfaces

Surfaces

• Web dashboard — chat, agents, connectors, channels, cron, settings
• CLI — octop run, octop chat, octop acp, admin commands
• HTTP/SSE/WebSocket API — full programmatic access

Knowledge & plugins

• Knowledge base — RAG over your documents; upload files and let semantic retrieval ground agent answers in your private corpus
• Plugins — install and manage third-party plugins (octop plugin); bundled plugins are seeded and toggled on demand from the dashboard

ACP (Agent Client Protocol)

Octop supports ACP in two directions:

1. Inbound — external tools use your Octop agent

   octop acp --agent main   # stdio ACP server for Zed, OpenCode, …
   

2. Outbound — Octop delegates to external coding agents

• Dashboard → ACP (/acp): configure runners (global per user)
• Enable acp_runner per agent, then delegate in chat

Full setup: docs/acp.md.

🧭 Roadmap

Here are our mid-to-long term plans:

• [ ] Shared resource pool — a central pool of skills and sub-agents that any user can drop into a new expert without rebuilding from scratch.
• [ ] Expert sharing — publish your experts to other users in the same deployment, so good configurations are reused instead of recreated.
• [ ] Browser & terminal polishing — browser skill recording (capture a workflow and replay it as a skill) and a more capable terminal AI assistant.
• [ ] AgentTeams — let one coordinator autonomously schedule and orchestrate multiple experts to tackle multi-step tasks.
• [ ] Self-evolution — automatically distill everyday conversations into reusable skills, so the assistant grows with you.
• [ ] PC / mobile clients — native desktop and mobile apps alongside the web dashboard and IM channels.

🚀 Quick Start

Prerequisites

• macOS / Linux / Windows
• No pre-installed Python required — the installer uses uv to provision Python 3.12 in an isolated venv under ~/.octop/
• A modern multi-core CPU with a few GB of RAM for the process plus model/embedding caches; enough disk for the database, agent workspaces, and document corpora

1. Install

macOS / Linux — one-line installer (recommended):

curl -fsSL https://finnie-1258344699.cos.ap-guangzhou.myqcloud.com/octop/install.sh | bash

Windows (PowerShell):

irm https://finnie-1258344699.cos.ap-guangzhou.myqcloud.com/octop/install.ps1 | iex

Windows (cmd) — download and run, or from a cloned repo:

curl -fsSL https://finnie-1258344699.cos.ap-guangzhou.myqcloud.com/octop/install.bat -o install.bat
install.bat

After installation, open a new terminal or reload your shell:

source ~/.zshrc   # Zsh
or
source ~/.bashrc  # Bash

The installer places octop on your PATH via ~/.octop/bin. Optional extras:

# Browser automation (Playwright Chromium)
curl -fsSL https://finnie-1258344699.cos.ap-guangzhou.myqcloud.com/octop/install.sh | bash -s -- --extras browser
Feishu channel support
curl -fsSL https://finnie-1258344699.cos.ap-guangzhou.myqcloud.com/octop/install.sh | bash -s -- --extras channels-feishu

See scripts/README.md for all install options (--version, --from-source, --mirror, Windows flags).

Desktop app (GUI, no terminal) — grab the artifact for your platform from GitHub Releases:

| Platform | Artifact | |----------|----------| | Windows | Octop-desktop-windows-amd64-.exe (64-bit) / Octop-desktop-windows-arm64-.exe (ARM64) — NSIS installer | | macOS | Octop-desktop-darwin-arm64-.dmg (Apple Silicon) / Octop-desktop-darwin-amd64-.dmg (Intel) | | Linux | Octop-desktop-linux-amd64-.tar.gz / Octop-desktop-linux-arm64-.tar.gz | | FnOS NAS | Octop-fnos-docker-.fpk (Docker-backed) / Octop-fnos-native-.fpk (no Docker) — install via App Center |

See desktop/README.md for the desktop shell and fnos/README.md for the FnOS packaging guide.

Alternative — PyPI (if you already manage Python yourself):

pip install octop
optional: pip install "octop[browser]"
optional local ONNX embedding model cache (Models → Local): pip install "octop[local-embedding]"
Downloads catalog weights under ~/.octop/embedding_models; not chat, not Memory.

From a source checkout with uv:

uv sync --extra local-embedding

2. Initialize

octop init

The interactive wizard creates the SQLite database, JWT secret, and first admin account under ~/.octop/.

3. Run

# Foreground (API + Web dashboard)
octop run
Custom host / port
octop run --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8088
Register as a system service (systemd / launchd / Windows service)
octop service start

Open http://127.0.0.1:8088. With Docker, the first init generates a random admin password (written to /data/.octop/credential.txt) unless OCTOP_DEFAULT_PASSWORD is set. Interactive octop init / the setup wizard asks you to choose a password (≥8 characters, letters and digits).

Docker (recommended for production)

# Build and start
docker compose -f docker/docker-compose.yml up -d
Or build manually
bash docker/docker_build.sh
docker run -d \
  -p 8088:8088 \
  -v octop-data:/data/.octop \
  -e HOME=/data \
  -e OCTOP_DEFAULT_PASSWORD="" \
  octop:latest

octop update          # fetch and install the latest octop, then restart the service if one is registered

# LLM providers and models
octop models
octop provider list
IM channels
octop channel list
octop channel install
Skills (per agent)
octop skills list --agent main
Cron jobs
octop cron list
octop cron create --help
Users (admin)
octop user list

~/.octop/                          ← install & data root
├── config.json                    # process config (optional database section)
├── octop.db                       # SQLite — users, agents, channels, cron, …
├── secrets/                       # JWT secret, channel tokens
├── agents/<agent_id>/             # per-agent workspace (SOUL.md, skills, …)
├── security/tool_guard/           # shell command allow/deny rules
├── logs/                          # runtime logs
├── venv/                          # uv-managed Python (installer layout)
└── bin/octop                      # PATH wrapper → venv/bin/octop

OctopServer
 ├─ DatabasePool            SQLite (WAL) or PostgreSQL
 ├─ SharedServices       DI root — every repo + config
 ├─ ExpertCatalog        scans agents/experts/library/ at boot
 ├─ UserManager
 │   └─ HarnessAgentManager (per user)
 │       └─ AgentRuntime (per agent)
 │           ├─ HarnessAgent      Agent runtime (harness-agent)
 │           ├─ HarnessProcessor  IM / UI / cron entry point
 │           ├─ ChannelManager    IM connections (harness-gateway)
 │           └─ CronManager       APScheduler
 └─ FastAPI app (uvicorn)

src/octop/
  config.py    env-var config
  launch.py    OctopServer boot + uvicorn
  infra/       business core (agents, gateway, cron, db, users, …)
  api/         HTTP layer — FastAPI app, routers, JWT, SSE
  cli/         CLI layer — Click commands
  dashboard/   built React SPA (wheel artifact)
dashboard/     frontend source (Vite) — edit here, run make build-frontend
docker/        Docker Compose, entrypoint, build & deploy scripts
tests/         unit/ + integration/

# Backend
make install          # pip install -e ".[dev]"
make all              # format-all + lint + typecheck + test (ship bar)
Frontend (separate terminal)
make dev-frontend     # Vite dev server on :5173 (override with VITE_DEV_PORT)
make build-frontend   # production build → src/octop/dashboard/
cd dashboard && npx tsc --noEmit