Zero
Open-source, self-hosted web UI for your own AI agent.
Chat with a fully local agent, wire up MCP servers and skills, connect channels, and tune every knob — all from a clean web interface you run yourself. Powered by Hooman and built with Next.js, React, and TypeScript.
Zero is a web front-end for the Hooman agent toolkit. You host it on your own machine or server, bring your own LLM API keys, and keep all configuration, chat history, and data on disk under your control — nothing is sent to a hosted backend.
- Self-hosted & private — runs as a single Node process; state lives in a local directory you own.
- Bring your own model — works with Anthropic, OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Bedrock, Google, Groq, MiniMax, Moonshot, Ollama, OpenRouter, and xAI.
- Extensible — connect MCP servers and install skills without touching code.
- Open source — MIT licensed; fork it, audit it, deploy it however you like.
Features
- Streaming chat with reasoning/thinking display, file attachments, resumable sessions, and a mobile-friendly layout.
- Tool approvals — review and approve tool calls before they run, or enable "yolo" auto-approval when you trust the agent.
- MCP servers — add, edit, remove, and reload servers over
stdio(local command), streamable HTTP, or SSE transports. - Skills — list, search, install, and remove agent skills.
- Channels — let the agent subscribe to and respond to channel messages autonomously via a background daemon.
- Deep configuration from Settings: providers & credentials, named models, web search, prompts/instructions, tools, subagents, context compaction, approvals, and channels.
Requirements
- Node.js ≥ 24 (see
enginesinpackage.json). - API access to at least one supported LLM provider (an API key, or a local Ollama instance).
The hoomanjs runtime is installed as a normal npm dependency (see package.json); no separate install is required.
Quick start
git clone https://github.com/vaibhavpandeyvpz/zero.git
cd zero
npm ci
npm run build
npm start
Then open http://127.0.0.1:3030.
On first run, open Settings → Providers to add an LLM provider and credentials, then Settings → Models to define a model. After that you're ready to chat.
Configuration
Data directory
Zero keeps all of its state in a single directory (created automatically):
- Default:
~/.zero - Override with the
ZERO_HOMEenvironment variable.
That directory holds:
Zero points Hooman's
HOOMAN_HOMEat this same directory, so everything the agent reads and writes stays underZERO_HOME.
Environment variables
Usage
The UI has two top-level areas:
- Chat — talk to the agent, attach files, resume previous sessions, and approve pending tool calls.
- Settings — everything else, organized into tabs:
- General — agent name and basics
- Providers — LLM provider credentials/connection details
- Models — named models that reference a provider
- Search — web search configuration
- Prompts — edit
instructions.md - Tools — enable/disable built-in tools
- Subagents — configure delegated agents
- Compaction — control conversation compaction
- Approvals — manage the tool approval policy
- Channels — toggle the channel daemon so the agent can handle channel messages
Development
npm ci
npm run dev
npm run dev runs the server with tsx under pm2-runtime in development mode on http://127.0.0.1:3030 with hot reloading via Next.js.
Useful scripts:
The stack is Next.js + React 19, an Express 5 API layer, Tailwind CSS with Radix/shadcn UI components, and the hoomanjs agent runtime.
Deployment / hosting
Zero is a standard Node server managed by PM2 (via pm2-runtime), which makes it straightforward to run in containers or on a VPS.
npm ci
npm run build
# Bind to all interfaces behind a reverse proxy:
HOST=0.0.0.0 PORT=3030 npm start
Recommendations:
- Put Zero behind a reverse proxy (nginx, Caddy, Traefik) that terminates TLS and adds authentication — Zero has no built-in auth and binds to
127.0.0.1by default. - Persist the
ZERO_HOMEdirectory (e.g. a mounted volume) so config, sessions, and memory survive restarts. - Provider API keys are stored in
config.jsonunderZERO_HOME; keep that directory secure and out of version control.
Related
Prefer a terminal-first agent with the same runtime, MCPs, skills, and channels? Check out Hooman — the CLI/ACP/MCP agent toolkit Zero is built on.
Contributing
Contributions are welcome! Please read CONTRIBUTING.md and CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md before opening issues or pull requests.
Security
Found a vulnerability? Please report it responsibly — see SECURITY.md.
