Installation

Prerequisites

To ensure Hexabot runs smoothly, you'll need the following:

• Docker: We recommend using Docker to start the app since multiple services are required (MongoDB, Nginx, etc.). All the necessary Docker Compose files are located in the docker folder.

Setting Up Docker for Development and Production

• Node.js: For development purposes, ensure you have Node.js >= v18.17.0 installed. We recommend using nvm (Node Version Manager) to easily manage and update your Node.js versions.

Setup Node.js with NVM

Do you want to install Hexabot on a Windows machine?

1. Download and install Docker Desktop for Windows.

2. During installation, ensure that you select the option to use WSL 2 as the default backend for Docker.

3. After installation, start Docker Desktop and verify that WSL integration is enabled:

4. Open Docker Desktop and go to Settings. Under the General tab, ensure that "Use the WSL 2 based engine" is selected. Under Resources > WSL Integration, enable integration with your installed Linux distribution (e.g., Ubuntu). Restart your machine to finalize the Docker installation.

5. Open your WSL terminal (e.g., Ubuntu).

6. Follow Hexabot installation steps below

Learn more : https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/wsl-containers

Installation

1. Install Hexabot CLI globally to have easy access to its commands:

npm install -g hexabot-cli

1. Create a new project:

hexabot create my-chatbot

1. Navigate to your project folder

cd my-chatbot/

1. Install dependencies:

npm i

1. Environment Setup:

To configure the environment variables, use the following command:

hexabot init

This will copy the .env.example file to .env in the ./docker directory if the file does not already exist.

You can find more about the Hexabot CLI command here.

1. Run in development mode: Once your environment is set up, you can start the app. Use the following command:

hexabot dev --services ollama

Notice that we added an extra service called Ollama. Ollama makes it easy to get up and running with large language models locally. Make sure to SSH into the container and pull the model(s) you would like to use:

docker exec -it ollama ollama pull tinyllama

You can pull different models, a complete reference of all the Ollama models can be found here: https://ollama.com/library.

Note: The first time you run the app, Docker will take some time to download all the required images

Usage

UI Admin Panel is accessible via http://localhost:8080, the default credentials are

Username

[email protected]

Password

adminadmin

Security: The default credentials are for local development only. If you expose the app outside localhost or run in production, create an admin user and change the password immediately. Do not keep default credentials enabled.