🏕️ Basecamp — The First Portable AI Agent Container with Network Auto-Discovery

v1.0.5 — the self-healing release:

• The Fixer's toolbox — basecamp now ships with every CLI it needs to EXECUTE fixes: postgres/mongosh/sqlite/redis clients, docker CLI + compose, yq, and full network diagnostics. It doesn't just describe the fix — it can run it (when the docker socket is mounted).
• tavern self-check — verifies every discovered service against its recipe and reports ✅/⚠️/❌ (self-heal #1). "The fixer approves."
• tavern update-check — polls Docker Hub/GHCR for newer image tags and reports what moved (self-heal #2).
• CI pitfall testing — GitHub Actions boots the full coding pack in the cloud on every push + nightly, runs self-check, and fails loudly on recipe drift (self-heal #3).
• Coding starter pack — 12 services incl. postgres/pgvector memory + mongo, with all verified pitfalls baked into the recipes (tabby pin, flowise pin, librechat mongo requirement, GHCR locations).

v1.0.4 — the fixer release. Basecamp Hermes now carries a soul:

• The Fixer — Basecamp Hermes has a purpose: making stacks talk to themselves. The SOUL.md gives it identity and a Fixer's Creed (name the setting, give the one line, verify it) so it answers connection problems with conviction, not guesses.
• Fix recipes baked in — 39 per-service wiring recipes (config location, exact keys, one-line fix, verification) ship inside the container. The stack skill embeds recipes inline for everything discovered, plus a full references/wiring-recipes.md for the rest.
• Skill always at hand — SOUL.md + -s basecamp-stack preload on every hermes launch mean the agent has the stack knowledge without having to remember to look for it.

v1.0.3 — the identity + reliability release:

• Indigo identity — Basecamp runs its own indigo skin ("Welcome to Basecamp Hermes!") so you can tell it apart from a host install at a glance; model readout shows basecamp/<model> (created via ollama cp alias on the discovered engine).
• Boot race fixed — the bundled-model pull now starts AFTER discovery, so the network scan never competes with a multi-GB download. Cold boots consistently discover the whole stack (7/7 on the reference stack).
• Smarter auto-select — an external Ollama (your stack) is preferred over the bundled fallback; alias creation is verified before use, and stale basecamp/ aliases are excluded from model lists.
• Separate commands — host hermes = your install; basecamp = the container edition. No more ambiguity about which agent you're in.
• tavern wire wiring wizard — every boot runs a stack wiring audit (✅ wired / ⚠️ needs attention / ❌ broken) with the exact one-line fix for anything mis-wired. Ask the container's Hermes "why won't my stack talk to each other?" — it has the ground truth via the injected basecamp-stack skill.
• Expanded discovery — 30+ service probes: KoboldCpp, LM Studio, SGLang, llamafile, exo, TGI, Aphrodite, LibreChat, LobeChat, AnythingLLM, Dify, Flowise, n8n, Langflow, RAGFlow, Qdrant, Milvus, Chroma, Weaviate, ComfyUI, A1111, InvokeAI, Whisper, Piper, OpenRouter, KoboldAI Horde.

v1.0.2 — the stack-gauntlet release (tested against a live 6-service AI stack):

• TabbyAPI + SillyTavern now discovered — auth-gated services (401/403) are fingerprinted and listed as [needs auth] so the connect screen can prompt for keys (previously invisible)
• Fixed hermes v0.20 wiring — named custom provider (providers.basecamp) with inline API key, sidestepping the #28660 security gate that blocks env keys for LAN endpoints; reasoning-effort turned off (local engines reject thinking params with HTTP 400); stale context probes cleared
• Ollama preferred for auto-select — hermes hard-requires ≥64K context, so headless mode picks an Ollama endpoint; OpenAI-compatible engines (TabbyAPI, vLLM) are still listed for interactive choice
• SearXNG probed via its fast static page — no more slow search-query probe losing the boot race

v1.0.1 — rebuilt on the official Hermes installer (the old pip3 install hermes-cli stub is gone), leaked-key fallback removed from tavern.sh, and the git history scrubbed of both. Build from source below.

One image. One command. It finds your AI stack and just works.

Basecamp bundles Hermes Agent (the full agent — tools, skills, memory, gateway) + Ollama (a brain it always has in its backpack), then does something nobody else's container does: it sniffs your network on first boot and auto-discovers your entire local AI stack — Ollama, TabbyAPI, vLLM, LiteLLM, LocalAI, llama.cpp, SearXNG, MCPO, Open WebUI, SillyTavern — and connects Hermes to the best brain it finds. No hardcoded URLs. No config files to hand-edit. Just docker run.

Self-healing (the fixer maintains itself)

Basecamp ships three self-healing layers so its wiring knowledge stays true even as the ecosystem moves:

1. tavern self-check — runs every discovered service against its recipe's verification step and reports ✅/⚠️/❌. Catches stale recipes and broken services before a user hits them. "The fixer approves."
2. tavern update-check — polls Docker Hub / GHCR for the newest published tag of every discovered service and reports what moved, so you can pull the newer image before an old one rots.
3. CI pitfall testing (.github/workflows/recipe-verify.yml) — on every push and nightly, GitHub Actions boots the full coding starter pack in the cloud, runs tavern self-check, and fails loudly when a recipe has gone stale (an image moved, a flag changed, a service renamed). Recipe drift gets caught in CI, not on a user's box.

The Coding Starter Pack (10 best-of-breed AI coding tools)

Basecamp ships a companion compose file that stands up a complete AI coding environment — every tool in its own container, all on the same Docker network, all wired to your stack's Ollama + TabbyAPI, all able to call each other by container name.

cd basecamp
docker compose -f docker-compose.starter.yml up -d
basecamp rediscover     # basecamp finds the whole pack
basecamp wire           # wiring audit

#	Service	What it is	Port
1	code-server	VS Code in the browser (the IDE)	8443
2	qdrant	Vector DB — code RAG backbone	6333
3	chroma	Lightweight vector DB (alternative)	8005
4	n8n	Workflow automation	5678
5	lobe-chat	AI chat UI (wired to stack Ollama)	3210
6	anythingllm	RAG workspace (docs + codebase Q&A)	3001
7	librechat	Multi-model chat UI (needs mongo — included)	3080
8	meilisearch	Full-text search (code/docs search)	7700
9	postgres	Postgres + pgvector — Hermes long-term memory	5432
10	mongo	MongoDB — LibreChat's database	27017

Removed (verified broken, 2026-08-09): tabby (its bundled llama-server dlopens libcuda.so.1 even with --device cpu — crash-loops in CPU-only containers; needs GPU access) and flowise (upstream dependency bug — @langchain/core export error crashes boot on latest and 3.1.4). Both have full "do not use" recipes in basecamp so the agent warns before anyone ships them again.

The IDE comes pre-loaded with Continue.dev (AI assistant). Point Continue's model at http://ollama:11434/v1 (or http://tabbyapi:5000/v1) — your stack's models power the whole pack. (Inline code completion via the Tabby extension is available but needs a completion server; tabby's own image is currently broken in CPU-only containers — see the recipe.)

Default credentials are in the compose file — change them before exposing anything publicly.

Why this is different

Everyone else	Basecamp
Manual compose file, hand-wired URLs	Auto-discovers your stack on first boot
One hardcoded provider	Picks the best brain it finds, falls back to its own Ollama
Agent config touches your host install	Container-only, env-scoped, cannot clobber a host Hermes
Separate agent + separate model server	One image, both inside, batteries included

Safety model (read this first)

Basecamp is container-only and is designed so it can never damage a Hermes install on the host that runs it:

• No writes into any Hermes home it doesn't own. Hermes runtime config (provider URL, key, model) is passed as environment variables, sourced from basecamp.env (chmod 600) at exec time. Basecamp never overwrites config.yaml or .env files — not in the container, and certainly not on the host.
• State lives in named volumes only. basecamp-hermes → /root/.hermes and basecamp-ollama → /root/.ollama inside the container. Nothing on the host is modified by running basecamp.
• No secrets in the image. API keys are collected at the connect screen, saved chmod 600 inside the volume, and injected into the dynamically generated tavern CLI. The static fallback tavern.sh ships with empty key placeholders.
• Hermes is installed with the official installer, never pip install hermes-cli (that PyPI package is an unrelated stub, not Hermes Agent).

Quick start

# Option A: pull the prebuilt image (Docker Hub)
docker pull jpanasuk/basecamp:1.0.5

# Option B: build from source
docker build -t local/basecamp:latest .

# Run against your AI docker network (named volumes keep state across runs)
docker run -it --rm \
  --name basecamp \
  --network your-ai-network \
  --gpus all \
  -p 11436:11434 \
  -v basecamp-ollama:/root/.ollama \
  -v basecamp-hermes:/root/.hermes \
  jpanasuk/basecamp:1.0.5

Or use the convenience launcher (auto-detects network + GPU, TTY-safe):

./basecamp.sh

First run shows the connect screen: pick your inference engine, enter API keys when prompted. Later runs skip it — config is saved in the volume.

What it discovers

Service	What Basecamp does with it
Ollama	Primary/secondary brain, lists available models
TabbyAPI / vLLM / LiteLLM / LocalAI / llama.cpp	Primary inference engine (OpenAI-compatible)
SearXNG	Wires search into the agent + tavern CLI
MCPO	Exposes MCP tools to the agent
Open WebUI / SillyTavern	Detects your chat UIs, reports them

Inside the container

Command	What it does
tavern status	Show connected services
tavern chat "hi"	Chat with your primary inference (streaming)
tavern models	List available models
tavern search "q"	Search via discovered SearXNG
tavern mcp	List/call discovered MCP tools
tavern rediscover	Re-scan for services
hermes	The Hermes Agent CLI, pointed at your stack
ollama	Manage basecamp's bundled Ollama

Layout

basecamp/
├── Dockerfile         # ubuntu:22.04 + Ollama + Hermes (official installer)
├── discover.py        # network scan, connect screen, tavern generator
├── tavern.sh          # static fallback CLI (no secrets)
├── entrypoint.sh      # first-run connect screen, env-scoped hermes config
├── basecamp.sh        # host-side launcher (docker only — never touches host config)
└── supervisord.conf   # Ollama only (hermes is exec'd, not supervised)

Credits

Basecamp is a packaging of Hermes Agent by Nous Research — all agent intelligence, tools, skills, and the gateway are theirs. Basecamp's only contribution is the box: the Docker packaging, the network auto-discovery, the safe env-scoped wiring, and the tavern toolkit. Full credit and gratitude to the Hermes team for building the agent that makes this project worth shipping.

Development notes

• Test discovery locally without touching anything: BASECAMP_CONFIG=/tmp/bc.json BASECAMP_DISCOVERY=/tmp/bc-disc.json BASECAMP_ENV_FILE=/tmp/bc.env python3 discover.py serve
• discover.py is container-only by design. It writes only to paths given by BASECAMP_CONFIG / BASECAMP_DISCOVERY / BASECAMP_ENV_FILE (defaults are under /root/.hermes / /opt/basecamp inside the container).
• If a secret ever leaks into this repo: rotate it, then scrub git history before publishing.