Deploying Hermes using docker-compose

Harries

2 min read

·

May 8, 2026

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The self-improving AI agent built by Nous Research . It’s the only agent with a built-in learning loop — it creates skills from experience, improves them during use, nudges itself to persist knowledge, searches its own past conversations, and builds a deepening model of who you are across sessions. Run it on a $5 VPS, a GPU cluster, or serverless infrastructure that costs nearly nothing when idle. It’s not tied to your laptop — talk to it from Telegram while it works on a cloud VM.

1. Import image

docker load -i myimage.tar

2. Create the hermes directory

mkdir hermes

3. Create the docker-compose.yaml file

services:
  hermes:
    image: nousresearch/hermes-agent:latest
    container_name: hermes
    restart: unless-stopped
    command: gateway run
    ports:
      - "8642:8642"
    volumes:
      - ~/.hermes:/opt/data
    networks:
      - hermes-net
    # Uncomment to forward specific env vars instead of using .env file:
    # environment:
    #   - ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=${ANTHROPIC_API_KEY}
    #   - OPENAI_API_KEY=${OPENAI_API_KEY}
    #   - TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN=${TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN}
    deploy:
      resources:
        limits:
          memory: 4G
          cpus: "2.0"
  dashboard:
      image: nousresearch/hermes-agent:latest
      container_name: hermes-dashboard
      restart: unless-stopped
      command: dashboard --host 0.0.0.0 --insecure
      ports:
        …