Your own AI assistant. Private, self-hosted, no hype required.

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What is this?

OpenPalm started as a hobby project — a weekend experiment to see if a useful AI assistant could be built on boring, standard tools instead of whatever the VC-funded flavor of the month is. Turns out it can. It's now a daily driver, and it keeps getting better.

The idea is simple: you run your own assistant on your own hardware, using Docker Compose and plain files you can actually read. No proprietary orchestration layer, no magic runtime, no lock-in. Just containers, env files, and compose overlays. If you can run docker compose up, you can run OpenPalm.

This is the anti-hype alternative. No "autonomous agent swarms." No "AGI-powered workflows." Just a well-structured assistant that stays on your LAN, remembers what you tell it, and does what you ask — built on standards that will still work next year.

Where things stand

OpenPalm is in active development. It works — I use it every day — but there's a lot of rough edges being sanded down right now:

• Stabilizing the core — The assistant, guardian, and memory services are solid, but the install and upgrade lifecycle is still getting hardened.
• Improving setup — The setup wizard works, but the goal is a one-command install that just does the right thing on any Docker host.
• Extending the assistant — More built-in tools, better memory integration, and first-class support for plugins and automations.

What you get

• An AI assistant that's yours — Runs on OpenCode, talks to any OpenAI-compatible model (local or remote), and remembers things between sessions.
• Channels — Talk to your assistant through a web chat, an API, Discord, Slack, or build your own adapter.
• Security by default — Every message passes through HMAC-signed verification, replay detection, and rate limiting before it reaches the assistant. The assistant itself has no Docker socket access.
• Plain files all the way down — The stack is Docker Compose files. Config is env files. Addons are compose overlays. No database for state, no hidden config, nothing you can't cat.
• LAN-first — Nothing is exposed to the internet unless you explicitly choose to expose it.

Get started

You need Docker with Compose V2 — that's it.

Platform	Install
Windows	Docker Desktop
Mac	Docker Desktop or OrbStack
Linux	curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com | sh

Then run the install script:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/itlackey/openpalm/main/scripts/setup.sh | bash

This downloads the CLI binary for your platform, seeds your ~/.openpalm/ directory, walks you through a setup wizard, and starts the stack. No cloning, no runtime dependencies beyond Docker.

If you'd rather set things up by hand with raw docker compose, see the setup guide.

Make it yours

• Swap models — Point it at OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, Ollama, LMStudio, or anything OpenAI-compatible.
• Add channels — Enable Discord, Slack, API, or web chat by copying an addon into your stack.
• Extend the assistant — Drop in OpenCode plugins, custom tools, or let the assistant find what they need with built-in AKM support.
• Schedule automations — Add YAML files to run recurring tasks on a cron schedule.
• Protect your secrets — Varlock optionally scans for leaks, validates env files, and redacts secrets from assistant output.

How it works

Clients talk to channels. Channels sign messages and send them through the guardian. The guardian validates everything and forwards to the assistant. The assistant does the work. That's it.

For the full walkthrough, see How It Works. For security invariants and architectural rules, see Core Principles.

Documentation

Guide	What's inside
Setup Guide	Install, update, and troubleshoot
How It Works	Architecture and data flow
Managing OpenPalm	Config, addons, secrets, automations
Core Principles	Security invariants and design rules
Community Channels	Build your own channel adapter
Full docs index	Everything else

Contributing

OpenPalm is open source under MPL-2.0. Contributions are welcome — just know that things move fast right now and the architecture is still settling. Check out the docs index to get oriented, and don't hesitate to open an issue if something breaks or doesn't make sense.