Deploy Clovar with Docker Compose

Prerequisites

You'll need the following installed on your machine:

• Docker Desktop (or Docker Engine + Compose plugin on Linux)
• Git to clone the repository
• At least 4 GB RAM allocated to Docker
• An Anthropic or OpenAI API key (for agent reasoning and embeddings) — or an Ollama instance for fully local inference

Clone the repository

Coming soon.

Create your environment file

Create a .env file in the platform/ directory:

# Postgres credentials (choose a strong password)
DB_PASSWORD=YourStrong!Passw0rd
DB_ROOT_PASSWORD=YourStrong!Passw0rd
DB_NAME=clovar-platform

# Optional: public URL and Caddy hostname
CLOVAR_BASE_URL=https://localhost
CLOVAR_HOSTNAME=localhost

# Optional: bundled Caddy reverse proxy profile (remove if you run your own proxy)
COMPOSE_PROFILES=caddy

The Postgres container provisions a clovar-service role on first boot using DB_PASSWORD. DB_ROOT_PASSWORD sets the postgres superuser password.

Start the stack

docker compose up -d

This starts the following services:

First boot takes about a minute while Postgres applies sql/schema.sql and the app containers compile. Tail progress with docker compose logs -f postgres.

Access the platform

Once all health checks pass:

Configure your AI provider key

On first launch, the setup wizard guides you through:

• Creating your first business (tenant)
• Adding your Anthropic or OpenAI API key (BYOK — you pay the AI provider directly)
• Creating your first department
• Deploying your first agent

A master API key is auto-generated on first run and saved to state/bootstrap-master-key.txt inside the API container. Use this for initial device pairing.

What's included (self-hosted)

Self-hosted Clovar is free and fully unlocked. No license keys, no feature gates:

Want managed hosting with AI inference included? Clovar Cloud is coming soon.