Deployment

Agents will be packaged and deployed as docker containers. While this capability is not fully developed, yet, this example will give you an idea of how it might eventually be realized.

Building the base image

Eventually, the base image would be available in Docker Hub, and to get started you'd need to simply pull that image down. Until then, you'll need to first build the base image, locally. To do so, once you've cloned the repository, locally, build the base image by running the following command from the root.

$ git clone https://github.com/MSDLLCpapers/teal-agents.git
$ cd teal-agents
$ make teal-agents

Running the agent

To run your agent with the base image, you'll need to make your configuration code files available to a running container and provide it with the appropriate environment variables referencing where you've mounted your files.

Note: We'll be running the same example as shown in demo 4, but now we'll be running it within the container.

First, set up your environment (.env) file as follows:

TA_API_KEY=<your-API-key>
TA_SERVICE_CONFIG=agents/config.yaml
TA_PLUGIN_MODULE=agents/custom_plugins.py
TA_REMOTE_PLUGIN_PATH=agents/remote-plugin-catalog.yaml

We'll use this file to set the environment for our running container. Note that the path we're specifying to all of our configuration is in the agents folder. That means we'll have to mount all of these files to that location in the container.

Also, since we're now moving everything inside the container, we'll need to update the remote plugin catalog (which references the local swagger file).

remote_plugins:
  - plugin_name: api_weather
    openapi_json_path: ./agents/openapi_weather.json
    server_url: https://api.open-meteo.com

For this example, we'll use docker compose to start the agent using the base container. In our compose.yaml file, we expose port 8000, leverage the environment file we previously created, and tell it to mount all of our configuration files in the /app/src/sk-agents/agents directory in the container.

services:
  teal-agents:
    image: localhost/teal-agents:latest
    ports:
      - "8000:8000"
    env_file: ".env"
    volumes:
      - ./agents:/app/src/sk-agents/agents

Start the container

$ docker compose up -d

The agent will now be running and available on port 8000, just as in demo 4.

Adding Dependencies

If your agent plugins require additional pip dependencies, simply add a requirements.txt file to your agent directory. When you start the agent, the listed dependencies will be automatically installed in the container and available for your plugins. If your additional dependencies are listed in a file named something other than requirements.txt, you can specify the file name using the environment variable TA_ADDL_REQUIREMENTS (note that this variable must prefix the file name with /src/sk-agents/agents/ as this is where the files are available within the container).