Installation

Hezo ships as a single self-contained binary - there's no runtime, language toolchain, or dependencies to install. Download it, run it, and you're up in seconds. The one thing to have in place first is a Docker-compatible runtime, which Hezo uses to run each project's agents in isolated containers on your machine - unless you point the instance at a managed sandbox service instead (below).

Prerequisites

• A Docker-compatible container runtime, running and reachable. Docker Engine (Linux), Docker Desktop, Colima, Rancher Desktop, OrbStack, Lima and rootless Docker all work - Hezo finds the daemon's socket automatically, whichever you use. On startup it checks for a working daemon and, if none is reachable, prints how to install or start one (with a link to Docker's install page) and exits - so set one up first. On Windows, where the console window closes with the process and would take that message with it, Hezo instead shows a dialog and offers to open Docker Desktop in the Microsoft Store. See Container runtimes for the full list, how the socket is discovered, and the extra mount step VM-backed runtimes like Colima need.
• A machine you're happy to leave running while agents work (a laptop is fine to start; a small always-on server is better for long-running teams).

Rather not run containers on this machine at all? A brand-new instance can start its agent containers on a managed sandbox service instead

• hezo --sandbox-backend daytona --daytona-api-key "<key>" - and then no container

runtime is needed here. See Containers for the trade-off. The choice stays live after install: Settings -> Containers switches an existing instance between local and remote containers at any time (Switching at any time) - the flag and environment variable only seed the first startup.

Install the binary

The one-line installer detects your OS and CPU architecture and downloads the matching binary from the latest release.

curl -fsSL https://hezo.ai/install.sh | sh

Manual download

Prefer to grab the binary yourself? Every release is published on GitHub Releases. Download the asset for your platform, make it executable (chmod +x), and put it on your PATH.

Start the server

hezo

This boots the Hezo server on port 3100 and creates its data directory at ~/.hezo/ on first run. Open http://localhost:3100 in your browser to continue.

To run on a different port or data directory:

hezo --port 8080 --data-dir /path/to/data

See the Configuration reference for every flag and environment variable.

Verify the install

hezo --help