Welcome to Onyx

To set up Onyx there are several options, Onyx supports the following for deployment:

Quick guided install via the install.sh script
Pulling the repo and running docker compose up -d from the deployment/docker_compose directory

Note, it is recommended to copy over the env.template file to .env and edit the necessary values

For large scale deployments leveraging Kubernetes, there are two options, Helm or Terraform.

This README focuses on the easiest guided deployment which is via install.sh.

For more detailed guides, please refer to the documentation: https://docs.onyx.app/deployment/overview

install.sh script

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/onyx-dot-app/onyx/main/deployment/docker_compose/install.sh > install.sh && chmod +x install.sh && ./install.sh

This provides a guided installation of Onyx via Docker Compose. It will deploy the latest version of Onyx and set up the volumes to ensure data is persisted across deployments or upgrades.

The script will create an onyx_data directory, all necessary files for the deployment will be stored in there. Note that no application critical data is stored in that directory so even if you delete it, the data needed to restore the app will not be destroyed.

The data about chats, users, etc. are instead stored as named Docker Volumes. This is managed by Docker and where it is stored will depend on your Docker setup. You can always delete these as well by running the install.sh script with --delete-data.

To shut down the deployment without deleting, use install.sh --shutdown.

Onyx CLI (alternative)

The same guided install also ships inside the Onyx CLI and will eventually replace install.sh once it stabilizes:

pip install onyx-cli && onyx-cli deploy install

It understands existing install.sh deployments (an onyx_data directory is detected and managed in place; new installs default to ~/.config/onyx) and adds lifecycle commands: onyx-cli deploy status (versions, containers, health), deploy stop, deploy upgrade [--tag vX.Y.Z] (rewrites only IMAGE_TAG, preserves your .env edits, backs up hand-edited files), and deploy uninstall.

Upgrading the deployment

Onyx maintains backwards compatibility across all minor versions following SemVer. If following the install.sh script (or through Docker Compose), you can upgrade it by first bringing down the containers. To do this, use install.sh --shutdown (or docker compose down from the directory with the docker-compose.yml file).

After the containers are stopped, you can safely upgrade by either re-running the install.sh script (if you left the values as default which is latest, then it will automatically update to latest each time the script is run). If you are more comfortable running docker compose commands, you can also run commands directly from the directory with the docker-compose.yml file. First verify the version you want in the environment file (see below), (if using latest tag, be sure to run docker compose pull) and run docker compose up to restart the services on the latest version

Environment variables

The Docker Compose files try to look for a .env file in the same directory. The install.sh script sets it up from a file called env.template which is downloaded during the initial setup. Feel free to edit the .env file to customize your deployment. The most important / common changed values are located near the top of the file.

IMAGE_TAG is the version of Onyx to run. It is recommended to leave it as latest to get all updates with each redeployment.

Every image publishes a -dev twin for each of its tags (e.g. latest-dev, v1.2.3-dev), so a single IMAGE_TAG=latest-dev selects the dev variant of the whole deployment. Today only the backend image actually differs: its -dev twin adds interactive debugging tools (vim, nano, curl, ps, psql) that the default image leaves out to stay minimal. The web-server, model-server, and sandbox -dev tags are identical to their plain counterparts and exist so that one version string covers every image.

Maintaining the compose files (contributors)

docker-compose.yml, docker-compose.prod.yml and docker-compose.prod-no-letsencrypt.yml are generated from the single source of truth docker-compose.template.yml — do not hand-edit them. To change any of the three, edit the template (per-variant differences are expressed with #!for / #!only / #!value directives, documented in ods generate-compose --help) and regenerate:

ods generate-compose --write

The generator lives in tools/ods (internal/composegen) and ships with the onyx-devtools package. The docker-compose-sync pre-commit hook runs it automatically for commits touching the template or the generated files, so a stray edit to a generated file gets reverted on the next commit.

onyx-cli embeds copies of the guided-install deployment files (the generated docker-compose.yml, the lite/craft overlays, env.template, the nginx config, and this README) under cli/internal/deploy/deployfiles/embedded/. The same ods generate-compose --write run refreshes them after rendering the variants, and a drift test in the cli module (go test ./...) gates staleness. If you change any of those files, re-run the generator and commit the refreshed embedded copies.