Logo Hermes Agent

Artificial Intelligence

Hermes Agent

The open-source AI agent from Nous Research that learns from you — self-hosted, MIT, sovereign.

Official documentation Source code

About Hermes Agent

Hermes Agent is the open-source AI agent from Nous Research, launched in early 2026 and now one of the fastest-growing agent projects on GitHub. Its distinctive trait: it "grows with you" — it creates skills from experience, refines them through use, searches its own past conversations and builds a model of who you are across sessions.

Under the MIT license, Hermes Agent self-hosts on a simple VPS. All of its memory and learning live within your infrastructure (`~/.hermes` volume), and you connect the LLM provider of your choice. It's a sovereign alternative to proprietary cloud AI agents: no dollar subscription, no memory of your exchanges stored with a third party.

What gets installed

Ready when the VPS starts

Compatible OS
Ubuntu 24.04
Application
Hermes Agent
Tech stack
DockerPython
Minimum RAM
4 GB
Minimum CPU
2 vCPU
Access
root over SSH

Key features

  • Self-learning agent: creates and refines its skills from experience
  • Persistent memory: remembers your exchanges from one session to the next
  • Searches its past conversations to respond better
  • LLM provider of your choice, local models possible
  • Lightweight: runs on an entry-level VPS
  • Open source (MIT), by Nous Research

When to use this solution?

An assistant that knows you

An agent that retains your preferences, your projects and your context over the weeks, instead of starting from scratch with each conversation.

Automation that improves

Hermes learns from every completed task and builds reusable skills, gaining autonomy over time.

Sovereign and private AI

Memory and learning stay on your VPS; no agent data is entrusted to a proprietary cloud service.

Guide

Deploy Hermes Agent on your VPS

  1. Order the VPS

    Choose a ServOrbit Cloud VPS (4 GB RAM recommended for the build and execution) running Ubuntu 24.04.

  2. Install from source

    Hermes Agent is built from the official repository: the script clones the project, builds the Docker image and launches the stack (docker compose up -d).

  3. Sign in for the first time

    Hermes has no login page: it is a command-line agent. Connect to the VPS over SSH, set your LLM key in /opt/hermes-agent/.env, restart the stack with docker compose up -d, then start the agent with docker exec -it hermes hermes.

  4. Configure the LLM provider

    Fill in the .env file (copied from .env.example) with the provider and the key of the model you want to use.

  5. Access the dashboard

    The Hermes dashboard only listens locally on the VPS: open an SSH tunnel from your machine (ssh -L 9119:127.0.0.1:9119 root@<vps-ip>), then go to http://localhost:9119. There is no reverse proxy and no certificate for you to install — and that is deliberate: bound to the loopback, this dashboard asks for NO password, yet it grants access to your API keys and to a terminal on the VPS. Never publish it on a domain without adding authentication of your own.

  6. Let the agent learn

    Over the course of your exchanges, Hermes enriches its memory and its skills (~/.hermes volume) — back up this volume to preserve the learning.

Frequently asked questions

Questions about Hermes Agent

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Hermes Agent is an open-source (MIT) AI agent developed by Nous Research. Self-hostable, it stands out for its continuous learning: it creates skills from experience and remembers your exchanges from one session to the next.

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Maintaining a project that uses Hermes Agent? This button lets your readers deploy it on a VPS in one click, without reading Docker documentation.

Deploy Hermes Agent on ServOrbit
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The button points to a VPS order with the template preselected. The image is served from servorbit.com — nothing to host on your side.

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