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Which guide is for me? This tab is for running your own GAIA with the gaia CLI. Using GAIA Cloud or an instance someone else runs? See the Docs. Changing GAIA’s code? See Developers.
Run GAIA on your own machine with two commands, then finish setup in your browser.
Open http://localhost:3000/setup, create the admin account and paste an API key for any supported AI provider (or point GAIA at a local Ollama). No cloud accounts and no hand-edited files. New here? The walkthrough shows every step with screenshots. Prefer a hosting platform? See Deploy options.

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What you need

  • Docker. If it’s missing, gaia up offers to install it.
  • 8 GB RAM, 2+ CPU cores and 20 GB of free disk (the images alone take about 13 GB). It boots in less, but the local memory model needs the RAM later (details).
  • One AI provider: a key from OpenAI, OpenRouter or Google Gemini, any OpenAI-compatible gateway, or Ollama running locally with no key. See AI models and tools.

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Everyday commands

Updating never touches your chats or settings. All data lives in Docker volumes. More in Updates & backups.

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Self-host vs Cloud

Self-hosted GAIA runs the same code as GAIA Cloud, with a lighter setup.
Self-host runs with ENV=selfhost and AUTH_MODE=local. Cloud and development use AUTH_MODE=workos.Only the database addresses (Compose provides them) and three machine secrets are needed: AGENT_SECRET, BOT_SESSION_TOKEN_SECRET and EMAIL_UNSUBSCRIBE_SECRET. gaia up generates them. Infisical is never contacted, even if old credentials are in the environment.INSTANCE_SECRET signs sessions and encrypts the keys you save. gaia up writes it to .env on a fresh install, so the key lives apart from the database. Without it, GAIA generates one on first boot and stores it in the database next to the keys, so a database dump alone can read them. See the instance secret.
Everything runs as Docker containers. Only the proxy opens a port (http://localhost:3000), so GAIA works on any hostname or IP with no URL setup.

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Next steps

CLI Setup

What gaia up does and how to run the install from the terminal

Updates & backups

Update, back up and restore your instance, and fix common problems

AI models and tools

Pick or change the AI provider, and add optional tools

Manual install with Docker

Install with plain docker compose, without the CLI

Deploy options

DigitalOcean, Coolify, Render and Railway, with costs and test status

Connect Integrations

Gmail, Calendar, GitHub and more through your own Composio project

MCP servers

Connect MCP servers on your machine or your network

Environment Variables

Optional integrations and what they enable