Hermes Web UI
Hermes Agent is a sophisticated autonomous agent that lives on your server, accessed via a terminal or messaging apps, that remembers what it learns and gets more capable the longer it runs.
Hermes WebUI is a lightweight, dark-themed web app interface in your browser for Hermes Agent.
Full parity with the CLI experience - everything you can do from a terminal, you can do from this UI. No build step, no framework, no bundler. Just Python and vanilla JS.
Layout: three-panel. Left sidebar for sessions and navigation, center for chat,
right for workspace file browsing. Model, profile, and workspace controls live in
the composer footer — always visible while composing. A circular context ring
shows token usage at a glance. All settings and session tools are in the
Hermes Control Center (launcher at the sidebar bottom).
Setup Hermes so you can access it natively on every device:
This gives you nearly 1:1 parity with Hermes CLI from a convenient web UI which you can access securely through an SSH tunnel from your Hermes setup. Single command to start this up, and a single command to SSH tunnel for access on your computer. Every single part of the web UI uses your existing Hermes agent and existing models, without requiring any additional setup.
Contents
- Why Hermes — what it is and how it compares
- Quick start — clone +
bootstrap.py / start.sh / ctl.sh
- Features — chat, sessions, workspace, voice, profiles, security, themes, panels, mobile
- Configuration & access — auto-discovery, overrides, remote/Tailscale/phone, manual launch
- Nix flake/module — declarative install and service
- Docker — single- and multi-container deploys
- Running tests
- Architecture — backend/frontend layout, state dir
- Docs — the full documentation index
- Contributors
Why Hermes
Most AI tools reset every session. They don't know who you are, what you worked on, or what
conventions your project follows. You re-explain yourself every time.
Hermes retains context across sessions, runs scheduled jobs while you're offline, and gets
smarter about your environment the longer it runs. It uses your existing Hermes agent setup,
your existing models, and requires no additional configuration to start.
What makes it different from other agentic tools:
- Persistent memory — user profile, agent notes, and a skills system that saves reusable
procedures; Hermes learns your environment and does not have to relearn it
- Self-hosted scheduling — cron jobs that fire while you're offline and deliver results to
Telegram, Discord, Slack, Signal, email, and more
- 10+ messaging platforms — the same agent available in the terminal is reachable from your phone
- Self-improving skills — Hermes writes and saves its own skills automatically from experience;
no marketplace to browse, no plugins to install
- Provider-agnostic — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, OpenRouter, and more
- Orchestrates other agents — can spawn Claude Code or Codex for heavy coding tasks and bring
the results back into its own memory
- Self-hosted — your conversations, your memory, your hardware
vs. the field (landscape is actively shifting — see docs/why-hermes.md for the full breakdown):
| OpenClaw | Claude Code | Codex CLI | OpenCode | Hermes |
|---|
| Persistent memory (auto) | Yes | Partial† | Partial | Partial | Yes |
| Scheduled jobs (self-hosted) | Yes | No‡ | No | No | Yes |
| Messaging app access | Yes (15+ platforms) | Partial (Telegram/Discord preview) | No | No | Yes (10+) |
| Web UI (self-hosted) | Dashboard only | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Self-improving skills | Partial | No | No | No | Yes |
| Python / ML ecosystem | No (Node.js) | No | No | No | Yes |
| Provider-agnostic | Yes | No (Claude only) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | Yes (MIT) | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
† Claude Code has CLAUDE.md / MEMORY.md project context and rolling auto-memory, but not full automatic cross-session recall
‡ Claude Code has cloud-managed scheduling (Anthropic infrastructure) and session-scoped /loop; no self-hosted cron
The closest competitor is OpenClaw — both are always-on, self-hosted, open-source agents
with memory, cron, and messaging. The key differences: Hermes writes and saves its own skills
automatically as a core behavior (OpenClaw's skill system centers on a community marketplace);
Hermes is more stable across updates (OpenClaw has documented release regressions and ClawHub
has had security incidents involving malicious skills); and Hermes runs natively in the Python
ecosystem. See docs/why-hermes.md for the full side-by-side.
Quick start
Run the repo bootstrap:
git clone https://github.com/nesquena/hermes-webui.git hermes-webui
cd hermes-webui
python3 bootstrap.py
Or keep using the shell launcher:
./start.sh
For self-hosted VM or homelab installs, ctl.sh wraps the common daemon lifecycle commands without requiring fuser or pkill:
./ctl.sh start # background daemon, PID at ~/.hermes/webui.pid
./ctl.sh status # PID, uptime, bound host/port, log path, /health
./ctl.sh logs --lines 100 # tail ~/.hermes/webui.log
./ctl.sh restart
./ctl.sh stop
ctl.sh start runs the bootstrap in foreground/no-browser mode behind the daemon wrapper, writes logs to ~/.hermes/webui.log, and respects .env plus inline overrides such as HERMES_WEBUI_HOST=0.0.0.0 ./ctl.sh start.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
