OpenHands Agent Canvas turns your coding agents into a self-hosted, always-on engineering team. It's a developer control center for starting conversations and automating everyday tasks — like generating reports that publish to Slack or automatically decomposing GitHub issues into tasks.

It runs locally on your machine by default, but can connect to multiple “agent backends”, e.g. running agents in Docker containers, on VMs, or within your company infrastructure. You can optionally choose to run agents on OpenHands Cloud or OpenHands Enterprise infrastructure.

Agent Canvas runs the open source OpenHands agent out-of-the-box, but can use any third-party agent like Claude Code and Codex.

If you have questions or feedback, please open a GitHub issue or join the #proj-agent-canvas channel in Slack.

[!NOTE]

The code in this repo is moving! See Agent Canvas transition FAQ

The source code for OpenHands Agent and Agent Server lives in OpenHands/software-agent-sdk.

The source code for Agent Canvas lives in OpenHands/agent-canvas.

Quickstart

You can install OpenHands to run agents on any machine: on your laptop, on a dedicated computer like a Mac Mini,

or on a server in the cloud.

The most powerful way to run OpenHands is on a server in the cloud. This allows your agents to continue running

even when your laptop is shut, and makes it easier to trigger your agents through third-party services

like Slack, GitHub, and Datadog. See the self-hosting guide for details, especially with respect to security hardening.

Notably, you can run the backend in _multiple different environments_, and switch between

them from the same Agent Canvas frontend. E.g. you can share an Agent Server with your team for agents doing

code review and dependency updates, then have your personal agents running on your laptop.

Option 1: Without a Sandbox

[!WARNING]

This runs the agent-server directly on the machine you're installing on — the agent will have full access to your filesystem!

Prerequisites: Node.js 22.12.x or later, uv

npm install -g @openhands/agent-canvas
agent-canvas

The agent-canvas command starts the full local stack by default. You can also split it when you want to run pieces separately:

agent-canvas --frontend-only  # static frontend + ingress only
agent-canvas --backend-only   # agent server + automation backend + ingress only

Option 2: With a Docker Sandbox

Prerequisites:

• Docker: Docker Desktop on macOS/Windows, or Docker Engine/Docker Desktop on Linux.
• A host directory for PROJECTS_PATH containing the project folders you want the agent to access. Create it before starting the container.

macOS / Linux:

export PROJECTS_PATH="$HOME/projects"  # directory containing your project folders
mkdir -p "$PROJECTS_PATH" "$HOME/.openhands"

docker run -it --rm \
  -p 8000:8000 \
  -v "$HOME/.openhands:/home/openhands/.openhands" \
  -v "${PROJECTS_PATH}:/projects" \
  ghcr.io/openhands/agent-canvas:1.0.0-rc.11

Windows (PowerShell / Windows Terminal): See README.windows.md for the equivalent commands.

The agent will be able to access any project under PROJECTS_PATH.

Option 3: From Source

[!WARNING]

This runs the agent-server directly on the machine you're installing on — the agent will have full access to your filesystem!

Prerequisites: Node.js 22.12.x or later, npm, uv (for running the agent server via uvx)

git clone https://github.com/OpenHands/agent-canvas.git
cd agent-canvas
npm install
npm run dev

---

Access the UI at http://localhost:8000. You can add additional backends directly from the UI.

Architecture

Agent Canvas is powered by the OpenHands Agent Server, a REST API for running multiple agents on a single machine. Each Agent Server runs on a single host/port; the Agent Canvas can connect to multiple Agent Servers and easily flip between them.

You can run an Agent Server anywhere:

• Directly on your laptop (be careful!)
• On a dedicated machine like a Mac Mini
• On a virtual machine in the cloud
• Inside OpenHands Cloud (our commercial offering)

The Agent Server is often paired with an Automation Server, which lets you set up agents that run on a schedule or in response to events.

More documentation

• Documentation index
• Architecture overview
• Development guide
• Self-hosting guide