The Hermes Bible

Get Hermes Agent up and running in under two minutes! Quick Install With the Hermes Desktop installer on macOS or Windows (recommended) To easily install the co

This guide gets you from zero to a working Hermes setup that survives real use. Install, choose a provider, verify a working chat, and know exactly what to do w

Hermes Agent can do a lot — CLI assistant, Telegram/Discord bot, task automation, RL training, and more. This page helps you figure out where to start and what

Updating Git installs Update to the latest version with a single command: This pulls the latest code from , updates dependencies, and prompts you to configure a

Hermes on Android with Termux This is the tested path for running Hermes Agent directly on an Android phone through Termux. It gives you a working local CLI on

Hermes Agent ships a Nix flake with three levels of integration: Level Who it's for What you get / Any Nix user (macOS, Linux) Pre built binary with all deps —

Hermes Agent includes a rich set of capabilities that extend far beyond basic chat. From persistent memory and file aware context to browser automation and voic

Tools are functions that extend the agent's capabilities. They're organized into logical toolsets that can be enabled or disabled per platform. Available Tools

Skills are on demand knowledge documents the agent can load when needed. They follow a progressive disclosure pattern to minimize token usage and are compatible

The curator is a background maintenance pass for agent created skills . It tracks how often each skill is viewed, used, and patched, moves long unused skills th

Hermes Agent has bounded, curated memory that persists across sessions. This lets it remember your preferences, your projects, your environment, and things it h

Hermes Agent ships with 8 external memory provider plugins that give the agent persistent, cross session knowledge beyond the built in MEMORY.md and USER.md. On

Hermes Agent automatically discovers and loads context files that shape how it behaves. Some are project local and discovered from your working directory. is no

Type followed by a reference to inject content directly into your message. Hermes expands the reference inline and appends the content under an section. Support

Hermes Agent's personality is fully customizable. is the primary identity — it's the first thing in the system prompt and defines who the agent is. — a durable

Hermes has a plugin system for adding custom tools, hooks, and integrations without modifying core code. If you want to create a custom tool for yourself, your

Hermes ships a small set of plugins bundled with the repository. They live under and load automatically alongside user installed plugins in . They use the same

Schedule tasks to run automatically with natural language or cron expressions. Hermes exposes cron management through a single tool with action style operations

The tool spawns child AIAgent instances with isolated context, restricted toolsets, and their own terminal sessions. Each child gets a fresh conversation and wo

Kanban — Multi Agent Profile Collaboration Want a walkthrough? Read the Kanban tutorial — four user stories (solo dev, fleet farming, role pipeline with retry,

Kanban tutorial A walkthrough of the four use cases the Hermes Kanban system was designed for, with the dashboard open in a browser. If you haven't read the Kan

Persistent Goals ( ) gives Hermes a standing objective that survives across turns. After every turn a lightweight judge model checks whether the goal is satisfi

Code Execution (Programmatic Tool Calling) The tool lets the agent write Python scripts that call Hermes tools programmatically, collapsing multi step workflows

Hermes has three hook systems that run custom code at key lifecycle points: System Registered via Runs in Use case Gateway hooks + in Gateway only Logging, aler

Batch processing lets you run the Hermes agent across hundreds or thousands of prompts in parallel, generating structured trajectory data. This is primarily use

Hermes Agent supports full voice interaction across CLI and messaging platforms. Talk to the agent using your microphone, hear spoken replies, and have live voi

Browser Automation Hermes Agent includes a full browser automation toolset with multiple backend options: Browserbase cloud mode via Browserbase for managed clo

Vision & Image Paste Hermes Agent supports multimodal vision — you can paste images from your clipboard directly into the CLI and ask the agent to analyze, desc

Image Generation Hermes Agent generates images from text prompts via FAL.ai. Eleven models are supported out of the box, each with different speed, quality, and

Hermes Agent supports both text to speech output and voice message transcription across all messaging platforms. TIP — Nous Subscribers If you have a paid Nous

MCP lets Hermes Agent connect to external tool servers so the agent can use tools that live outside Hermes itself — GitHub, databases, file systems, browser sta

Hermes Agent can run as an ACP server, letting ACP compatible editors talk to Hermes over stdio and render: chat messages tool activity file diffs terminal comm

The API server exposes hermes agent as an OpenAI compatible HTTP endpoint. Any frontend that speaks the OpenAI format — Open WebUI, LobeChat, LibreChat, NextCha

Honcho is an AI native memory backend that adds dialectic reasoning and deep user modeling on top of Hermes's built in memory system. Instead of simple key valu

Provider Routing When using OpenRouter as your LLM provider, Hermes Agent supports provider routing — fine grained control over which underlying AI providers ha

Fallback Providers Hermes Agent has three layers of resilience that keep your sessions running when providers hit issues: 1. Credential pools — rotate across mu

Credential Pools Credential pools let you register multiple API keys or OAuth tokens for the same provider. When one key hits a rate limit or billing quota, Her

Codex App Server Runtime Hermes can optionally hand and turns to the Codex CLI app server instead of running its own tool loop. When enabled, terminal commands,

Computer Use (macOS) Hermes Agent can drive your Mac's desktop — clicking, typing, scrolling, dragging — in the background . Your cursor doesn't move, keyboard

Deliverable Mode When Hermes Agent runs inside a messaging gateway (Slack, Discord, Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, etc.), it can deliver generated files directly i

The Hermes web dashboard ( ) is built to be reskinned and extended without forking the codebase. Three layers are exposed: 1. Themes — YAML files that repaint t

Kanban worker lanes A worker lane is a class of process that the kanban dispatcher can route tasks to. Each lane has an identity (the assignee string), a spawn

Language Server Protocol (LSP) Hermes runs full language servers — pyright, gopls, rust analyzer, typescript language server, clangd, and ~20 more — as backgrou

Skins control the visual presentation of the Hermes CLI: banner colors, spinner faces and verbs, response box labels, branding text, and the tool activity prefi

Spotify Hermes can control Spotify directly — playback, queue, search, playlists, saved tracks/albums, and listening history — using Spotify's official Web API

The subscription proxy is a local HTTP server that lets external apps — OpenViking, Karakeep, Open WebUI, anything that speaks OpenAI compatible chat completion

One subscription. Every tool built in. The Tool Gateway is included with every paid Nous Portal subscription. It routes Hermes' tool calls — web search, image g

Tool Search When you have many MCP servers or non core plugin tools attached to a session, their JSON schemas can consume a substantial fraction of the context

The web dashboard is a browser based UI for managing your Hermes Agent installation. Instead of editing YAML files or running CLI commands, you can configure se

Web Search & Extract Hermes Agent includes two model callable web tools backed by multiple providers: — search the web and return ranked results — fetch and ext

X (Twitter) Search The tool lets the agent search X (Twitter) posts, profiles, and threads directly. It's backed by xAI's built in tool on the Responses API at

Chat with Hermes from Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, SMS, Email, Home Assistant, Mattermost, Matrix, DingTalk, Feishu/Lark, WeCom, Weixin, BlueBubb

Telegram Setup Hermes Agent integrates with Telegram as a full featured conversational bot. Once connected, you can chat with your agent from any device, send v

Discord Setup Hermes Agent integrates with Discord as a bot, letting you chat with your AI assistant through direct messages or server channels. The bot receive

Slack Setup Connect Hermes Agent to Slack as a bot using Socket Mode. Socket Mode uses WebSockets instead of public HTTP endpoints, so your Hermes instance does

WhatsApp Setup Hermes connects to WhatsApp through a built in bridge based on Baileys . This works by emulating a WhatsApp Web session — not through the officia

Signal Setup Hermes connects to Signal through the signal cli daemon running in HTTP mode. The adapter streams messages in real time via SSE (Server Sent Events

Email Setup Hermes can receive and reply to emails using standard IMAP and SMTP protocols. Send an email to the agent's address and it replies in thread — no sp

SMS Setup (Twilio) Hermes connects to SMS through the Twilio API. People text your Twilio phone number and get AI responses back — same conversational experienc

Matrix Setup Hermes Agent integrates with Matrix, the open, federated messaging protocol. Matrix lets you run your own homeserver or use a public one like matri

Mattermost Setup Hermes Agent integrates with Mattermost as a bot, letting you chat with your AI assistant through direct messages or team channels. Mattermost

Home Assistant Integration Hermes Agent integrates with Home Assistant in two ways: 1. Gateway platform — subscribes to real time state changes via WebSocket an

Receive events from external services (GitHub, GitLab, JIRA, Stripe, etc.) and trigger Hermes agent runs automatically. The webhook adapter runs an HTTP server

BlueBubbles (iMessage) Connect Hermes to Apple iMessage via BlueBubbles — a free, open source macOS server that bridges iMessage to any device. Prerequisites A

DingTalk Setup Hermes Agent integrates with DingTalk (钉钉) as a chatbot, letting you chat with your AI assistant through direct messages or group chats. The bot

Feishu / Lark Setup Hermes Agent integrates with Feishu and Lark as a full featured bot. Once connected, you can chat with the agent in direct messages or group

Google Chat Setup Connect Hermes Agent to Google Chat as a bot. The integration uses Cloud Pub/Sub pull subscriptions for inbound events and the Chat REST API f

LINE Setup Run Hermes Agent as a LINE bot via the official LINE Messaging API. The adapter lives as a bundled platform plugin under — no core edits, just enable

The gateway platform is an inbound event listener. It's how Hermes receives change notifications from Microsoft Graph — "a Teams meeting ended," "a new message

ntfy ntfy is a simple HTTP based pub sub notification service. It works with the free public server at or any self hosted instance, and supports any client that

Open WebUI Integration Open WebUI (126k★) is the most popular self hosted chat interface for AI. With Hermes Agent's built in API server, you can use Open WebUI

Photon iMessage Connect Hermes to iMessage through [Photon][photon], a managed service that handles the Apple line allocation and abuse prevention layer so you

QQ Bot Connect Hermes to QQ via the Official QQ Bot API (v2) — supporting private (C2C), group @ mentions, guild, and direct messages with voice transcription.

SimpleX Chat SimpleX Chat is a private, decentralised messaging platform where users own their contacts and groups. Unlike other platforms, SimpleX assigns no p

Microsoft Teams Meetings Use the Teams meeting pipeline when you want Hermes to ingest Microsoft Graph meeting events, fetch transcripts first, fall back to rec

Microsoft Teams Setup Connect Hermes Agent to Microsoft Teams as a bot. Unlike Slack's Socket Mode, Teams delivers messages by calling a public HTTPS webhook ,

WeCom Callback (Self Built App) Connect Hermes to WeCom (Enterprise WeChat) as a self built enterprise application using the callback/webhook model. INFO — WeCo

Connect Hermes to WeCom (企业微信), Tencent's enterprise messaging platform. The adapter uses WeCom's AI Bot WebSocket gateway for real time bidirectional communica

Connect Hermes to WeChat (微信), Tencent's personal messaging platform. The adapter uses Tencent's iLink Bot API for personal WeChat accounts — this is distinct f

WhatsApp Business Cloud API Setup Hermes can connect to WhatsApp through Meta's official WhatsApp Business Cloud API. This is the production grade path: no Node

Connect Hermes to Yuanbao, Tencent's enterprise messaging platform. The adapter uses a WebSocket gateway for real time message delivery and supports both direct

Bitwarden Secrets Manager Pull API keys from Bitwarden Secrets Manager at process startup instead of storing them in plaintext inside . One bootstrap secret (a

Secrets Hermes can pull API keys from external secret managers at process startup instead of storing them in . The bootstrap token for the secret manager lives

Google Workspace Skill Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Contacts, Sheets, and Docs integration for Hermes. Uses OAuth2 with automatic token refresh. Prefers the Google W

Hermes Agent's CLI is a full terminal user interface (TUI) — not a web UI. It features multiline editing, slash command autocomplete, conversation history, inte

The TUI is the modern front end for Hermes — a terminal UI backed by the same Python runtime as the Classic CLI. Same agent, same sessions, same slash commands;

All settings are stored in the directory for easy access. TIP — Easiest path to a working Run — one OAuth gets you a model provider and all four Tool Gateway to

Configuring Models Hermes uses two kinds of model slots: Main model — what the agent thinks with. Every user message, every tool call loop, every streamed respo

Hermes Agent automatically saves every conversation as a session. Sessions enable conversation resume, cross session search, and full conversation history manag

Profiles: Running Multiple Agents Run multiple independent Hermes agents on the same machine — each with its own config, API keys, memory, sessions, skills, and

Hermes Agent is often used on large, long‑lived repositories. When you want to: Run multiple agents in parallel on the same project, or Keep experimental refact

Hermes Agent — Docker There are two distinct ways Docker intersects with Hermes Agent: 1. Running Hermes IN Docker — the agent itself runs inside a container (t

Hermes Agent is designed with a defense in depth security model. This page covers every security boundary — from command approval to container isolation to user

Checkpoints and Hermes Agent can automatically snapshot your project before destructive operations and restore it with a single command. Checkpoints are opt in

The Hermes desktop app is a native app built around the same agent you get from the CLI and the gateway — same config, same API keys, same sessions, same skills

Running Many Gateways at Once Operate multiple profiles — each with its own bot tokens, sessions, and memory — as managed services on a single machine. This pag

Profile Distributions: Share a Whole Agent A profile distribution packages a complete Hermes agent — personality, skills, cron jobs, MCP connections, config — a

Hermes runs natively on Windows 10 and Windows 11 — no WSL, no Cygwin, no Docker. This page is the deep dive: what works natively, what's WSL only, what the ins

Hermes Agent now supports both native Windows and WSL2. This page covers the WSL2 path; for the native PowerShell install see the dedicated Windows (Native) Gui

Hermes Agent connects to external systems for AI inference, tool servers, IDE workflows, programmatic access, and more. These integrations extend what Hermes ca

This page covers setting up inference providers for Hermes Agent — from cloud APIs like OpenRouter and Anthropic, to self hosted endpoints like Ollama and vLLM,

Nous Portal is Nous Research's unified subscription gateway and the recommended way to run Hermes Agent . One OAuth login replaces the juggling act of separate

Official NousResearch adapter repository for connecting Hermes Agent with Paperclip. Use it when you need the current adapter source, README, installation notes, and compatibility boundary before wiring Paperclip into a Hermes workflow.

A quick wins collection of practical tips that make you immediately more effective with Hermes Agent. Each section targets a different aspect — scan the headers

This guide walks you through running a local LLM server on macOS with an OpenAI compatible API. You get full privacy, zero API costs, and surprisingly good perf

Tutorial: Build a Daily Briefing Bot In this tutorial, you'll build a personal briefing bot that wakes up every morning, researches topics you care about, summa

Set Up a Team Telegram Assistant This tutorial walks you through setting up a Telegram bot powered by Hermes Agent that multiple team members can use. By the en

Hermes isn't just a CLI tool. You can import directly and use it programmatically in your own Python scripts, web applications, or automation pipelines. This gu

This guide shows how to actually use MCP with Hermes Agent in day to day workflows. If the feature page explains what MCP is, this guide is about how to get val

This guide is the practical companion to the Voice Mode feature reference. If the feature page explains what voice mode can do, this guide shows how to actually

is the primary identity for your Hermes instance. It's the first thing in the system prompt — it defines who the agent is, how it speaks, and what it avoids. If

This guide walks through building a complete Hermes plugin from scratch. By the end you'll have a working plugin with multiple tools, lifecycle hooks, shipped d

The daily briefing bot tutorial covers the basics. This guide goes further — five real world automation patterns you can adapt for your own workflows. For the f

Skills are on demand knowledge documents that teach Hermes how to handle specific tasks — from generating ASCII art to managing GitHub PRs. This guide walks you

Hermes can spawn isolated child agents to work on tasks in parallel. Each subagent gets its own conversation, terminal session, and toolset. Only the final summ

Tutorial: Build a GitHub PR Review Agent The problem: Your team opens PRs faster than you can review them. PRs sit for days waiting for eyeballs. Junior devs me

Copy paste blueprints for common automation patterns. Each blueprint uses Hermes's built in cron scheduler for time based triggers and webhook platform for even

Hermes Agent supports Amazon Bedrock as a native provider using the Converse API — not the OpenAI compatible endpoint. This gives you full access to the Bedrock

Hermes Agent's provider supports Microsoft Foundry (formerly Azure AI Foundry) and Azure OpenAI. A single Foundry resource can host models with two different wi

Script Only Cron Jobs Sometimes you already know exactly what message you want to send. You don't need an agent to reason about it — you just need a script to r

When a cron job isn't behaving as expected, work through these checks in order. Most issues fall into one of four categories: timing, delivery, permissions, or

Hermes Agent supports Google Gemini as a native provider using the Google AI Studio / Gemini API — not the OpenAI compatible endpoint. This lets Hermes translat

The Problem Cloud LLM APIs charge per token. A heavy coding session can cost $5–20. For personal projects, learning, or privacy sensitive work, that adds up — a

The Teams meeting pipeline reads meeting transcripts, recordings, and related artifacts from Microsoft Graph using app only (daemon) authentication — no user si

imports your OpenClaw (or legacy Clawdbot/Moldbot) setup into Hermes. This guide covers exactly what gets migrated, the config key mappings, and what to verify

Hermes Agent supports MiniMax through a browser based OAuth login flow, using the same credentials as the MiniMax portal. No API key or credit card is required

Some Hermes providers — xAI Grok OAuth , Spotify , and remote MCP servers (Linear, Sentry, Atlassian, Asana, Figma, …) — use a loopback redirect OAuth flow. The

Use this guide after you have already enabled the feature from Teams Meetings. This page covers: operator CLI flows routine subscription maintenance failure tri

is a small, scriptable CLI that pushes a message to any messaging platform Hermes is already configured for. Think of it as a cross platform for notifications —

This guide walks you through running Hermes Agent on a Nous Portal subscription end to end — from signing up to verifying that every tool routes correctly. If y

Nous Research has been inducted into the Nemotron Coalition of leading AI labs working with NVIDIA to advance open frontier foundation models. In honor of this,

This guide walks you through connecting Hermes Agent to GitHub so it automatically fetches a pull request's diff, analyzes the code changes, and posts a comment

Hermes Agent supports xAI Grok through a browser based OAuth login flow against accounts.x.ai, using either a SuperGrok subscription (grok.com) or an X Premium+

Thank you for contributing to Hermes Agent! This guide covers setting up your dev environment, understanding the codebase, and getting your PR merged. Contribut

This page is the top level map of Hermes Agent internals. Use it to orient yourself in the codebase, then dive into subsystem specific docs for implementation d

The core orchestration engine is 's class — a large file that handles everything from prompt assembly to tool dispatch to provider failover. Core Responsibiliti

Hermes deliberately separates: cached system prompt state ephemeral API call time additions This is one of the most important design choices in the project beca

Context Compression and Caching Hermes Agent uses a dual compression system and Anthropic prompt caching to manage context window usage efficiently across long

The messaging gateway is the long running process that connects Hermes to 20+ external messaging platforms through a unified architecture. Key Files File Purpos

Session Storage Hermes Agent uses a SQLite database ( ) to persist session metadata, full message history, and model configuration across CLI and gateway sessio

Hermes has a shared provider runtime resolver used across: CLI gateway cron jobs ACP auxiliary model calls Primary implementation: — credential resolution, — pr

Before writing a tool, ask yourself: should this be a skill instead? WARNING — Built in Core Tools Only This page is for adding a built in Hermes tool to the re

Hermes can already talk to any OpenAI compatible endpoint through the custom provider path. Do not add a built in provider unless you want first class UX for th

Adding a Platform Adapter This guide covers adding a new messaging platform to the Hermes gateway. A platform adapter connects Hermes to an external messaging s

Skills are the preferred way to add new capabilities to Hermes Agent. They're easier to create than tools, require no code changes to the agent, and can be shar

Hermes exposes protected extension hooks on so wrapper CLIs can add widgets, keybindings, and layout customizations without overriding the 1000+ line method. Th

The ACP adapter wraps Hermes' synchronous in an async JSON RPC stdio server. Key implementation files: Boot flow The Zed ACP Registry path launches the same ada

The CDP supervisor closes two long standing gaps in Hermes' browser tooling: 1. Native JS dialogs ( / / / ) block the page's JS thread. Without supervision, the

Building a Context Engine Plugin Context engine plugins replace the built in with an alternative strategy for managing conversation context. For example, a Loss

The cron subsystem provides scheduled task execution — from simple one shot delays to recurring cron expression jobs with skill injection and cross platform del

Building an Image Generation Provider Plugin Image gen provider plugins register a backend that services every tool call — DALL·E, gpt image, Grok, Flux, Imagen

Building a Memory Provider Plugin Memory provider plugins give Hermes Agent persistent, cross session knowledge beyond the built in MEMORY.md and USER.md. This

Building a Model Provider Plugin Model provider plugins declare an inference backend — an OpenAI compatible endpoint, an Anthropic Messages server, a Codex styl

is the supported way for a plugin to make an LLM call. Chat completion, structured extraction, sync, async, with or without images — same surface, same trust ga

Hermes ships three protocols for driving the agent from external programs — IDE plugins, custom UIs, CI pipelines, embedded sub agents. Pick the one that matche

Hermes tools are self registering functions grouped into toolsets and executed through a central registry/dispatch system. Primary files: Tool registration mode

Trajectory Format Hermes Agent saves conversation trajectories in ShareGPT compatible JSONL format for use as training data, debugging artifacts, and reinforcem

Building a Video Generation Provider Plugin Video gen provider plugins register a backend that services every tool call. Built in providers (xAI, FAL) ship as p

Building a Web Search Provider Plugin Web search provider plugins register a backend that services , , and (optionally) deep crawl tool calls. Built in provider

This page covers the terminal commands you run from your shell. For in chat slash commands, see Slash Commands Reference. Global entrypoint Global options Optio

Hermes has two slash command surfaces, both driven by a central in : Interactive CLI slash commands — dispatched by , with autocomplete from the registry Messag

Profile Commands Reference This page covers all commands related to Hermes profiles. For general CLI commands, see CLI Commands Reference. Top level command for

Environment Variables Reference All variables go in . You can also set them with . LLM Providers Variable Description OpenRouter API key (recommended for flexib

This page documents Hermes' built in tools, grouped by toolset. Availability varies by platform, credentials, and enabled toolsets. Quick counts (current regist

Toolsets are named bundles of tools that control what the agent can do. They're the primary mechanism for configuring tool availability per platform, per sessio

This page is the compact reference companion to the main MCP docs. For conceptual guidance, see: MCP (Model Context Protocol) Use MCP with Hermes Root config sh

Model Catalog Hermes fetches curated model lists for OpenRouter and Nous Portal from a JSON manifest hosted alongside the docs site. This lets maintainers updat

Hermes ships with a large built in skill library copied into on install. Each skill below links to a dedicated page with its full definition, setup, and usage.

Optional skills ship with hermes agent under but are not active by default . Install them explicitly: For example: Each skill below links to a dedicated page wi

Quick answers and fixes for the most common questions and issues. Frequently Asked Questions What LLM providers work with Hermes? Hermes Agent works with any Op