Getting Started

Trinity is an open-source autonomous agent orchestration platform — infrastructure for deploying, orchestrating, and governing fleets of AI agents on your own hardware. Each agent runs in an isolated Docker container with a pluggable runtime (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, or Gemini CLI), persists memory across sessions, can delegate to other agents, and can run on schedules without human intervention. You interact with the platform through a web UI, a REST API, or MCP tools. See Getting Started.

You need Docker Desktop (or Docker with Docker Compose), Git, at least 8GB of RAM, and a modern web browser. Trinity cannot run without Docker — all platform services and every agent run as containers. See Deploying Trinity.

Clone the repository from GitHub, copy .env.example to .env, and run ./scripts/deploy/start.sh. The script starts the backend, frontend, MCP server, Redis, scheduler, and log aggregator, and builds the base agent image automatically if it's missing (which takes 5–10 minutes on first run). Then open http://localhost in your browser. See Setup.

Yes. Ability.ai offers a cloud-hosted option where you sign up, copy an MCP connection URL from Settings, and connect from Claude Code — no infrastructure to manage. Self-hosting is free forever and keeps all data inside your own perimeter, which suits teams with compliance requirements. See Deploying Trinity.

If you didn't set ADMIN_PASSWORD in .env before first boot, you see a one-page "Create your admin account" form: enter your admin email (required — it becomes your sign-in identity), a password of 12+ characters with mixed case, a number, and a special character, and optionally your company name. The form works exactly once and disables itself permanently after the admin account is created. If you did set ADMIN_PASSWORD, the account is created automatically and no setup screen appears. Note that until setup completes, the form is reachable without authentication — keep an internet-facing server behind a tunnel, VPN, or firewall until you've finished. See Setup.

There are two methods. Admin login: enter the username admin or the admin email you registered at setup, plus your password. Email login (passwordless): enter your email address, receive a 6-digit verification code, and submit it — this requires a configured email service and your address must be on the whitelist. See Setup.

The email whitelist controls which email addresses can log in via the passwordless email-code flow. The admin manages it under Settings > Email Whitelist. Whitelisted users who sign up receive the creator role by default, which lets them immediately create and manage their own agents. See Roles and Permissions.

Two common reasons: their address isn't on the email whitelist, or no email service is configured so verification codes can't be delivered. Ask your admin to add the address under Settings > Email Whitelist, and check that EMAIL_PROVIDER in .env is set to a real provider. Without email service configuration, only admin password login is available. See Setup.

The default email provider is console, which is meant for development — it prints the email (including the code) to the backend logs instead of sending it. For real delivery, set EMAIL_PROVIDER in .env to smtp, sendgrid, or resend and fill in the matching credentials. Also confirm your address is on the whitelist, since codes only go to allowed emails. See Setup.

First check that Docker is actually running — Trinity can't start without it. If Docker is up, another process may already hold port 80, which the frontend binds by default; add FRONTEND_PORT=8090 (or any free port) to .env, restart with ./scripts/deploy/start.sh, and open http://localhost:8090 instead. See Deploying Trinity.

The web UI is at http://localhost, the backend API with interactive Swagger docs is at http://localhost:8000/docs, and the MCP server is at http://localhost:8080/mcp. Local and production deployments use the same ports. See Setup.

On a fresh install, a guided onboarding wizard opens automatically on your first Dashboard visit — it asks what you want your first agent to do, pre-selects a matching starter template, and walks you through creation. You can also do it manually: click Create Agent on the Dashboard, choose a template (a configured GitHub repo, a github:Org/repo URL, or from scratch), enter a lowercase name, and click Create. Trinity clones the template, builds the container, and starts the agent. See Setup.

On a truly fresh install, Trinity auto-seeds a ready-to-use "Cornelius" second-brain agent so you land on a working agent without configuring a template first. It ships with the Brain Orb enabled — a self-rendering 3D knowledge graph on its Brain tab. This happens once only: it's skipped if the instance already has agents, and deleting Cornelius does not re-create it. See Setup.

A template is a GitHub repository or local directory that defines an agent's initial configuration — its instructions (CLAUDE.md), metadata (template.yaml), MCP tool configuration, and credential declarations. When you create an agent, Trinity copies the template files into the agent's workspace and reports any declared credentials as "missing" until you configure them. See Creating Agents.

Yes. Trinity is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 — free for any use, commercial included, with an explicit patent grant. You can run it on your own infrastructure, any cloud, or a managed instance. See the LICENSE file in the repository.

Trinity is open-core: the open-source platform in the public repository is complete and fully functional on its own. Customers with an enterprise agreement additionally get access to a private companion repository that mounts as an optional module and unlocks extra capabilities under a separate commercial license — for example shared multi-agent chat rooms, per-agent Slack bot identities, and opt-in fleet usage-sharing with benchmarks (described generically here; the specifics live in the private repo). You can check what your instance is running via GET /api/version, which reports edition (oss or enterprise) and the list of registered enterprise features — an empty list is normal for open-source installs. See Enterprise Modules.

Ask the docs Q&A bot from the repo with ./scripts/ask-trinity.sh "your question", or use the floating Help widget inside the UI, which lets you ask questions, report bugs, request features, and send private feedback. You can also open GitHub Issues or Discussions, and watch workshops, demos, and deep-dives in the video library. See Getting Help.