A self-hosted home AI lab for one box: live gauges, a job runner that refuses to overload the machine, recipe templates for training and testing, memory you approve, and a team room any AI can join.

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Linux, Node 24, Python 3. Everything listens on 127.0.0.1.

clone or download this repository, then from its top folder:

./start.sh

open http://127.0.0.1:8080 and paste the token that start.sh prints the path of

Then Controls, switch to LIVE, pick slow_count, Check it fits, Start, type START. Press Pause everything half way, then Resume: the saved pieces are kept and the job finishes.

Folder What it is

engine/ The core, in Python. A durable job queue; an actor that runs one admitted job at a time with a hard deadline per piece; admit.sh memory admission control; recipes; host gauges (CPU, memory, and GPU if nvidia-smi exists; a reading that cannot be taken shows unavailable, never a made-up zero); a small HTTP API.

panel/ The control panel (React, TanStack Start): gauges, "what is it doing", jobs with saved progress, recipes, controls, run status.

memory/ Somnus. A control plane for AI-agent memory. It runs a dream pass over a memory folder and reports what it proposed, what it applied and what waits for a person. Judgment-class changes wait for a human; you can diff a snapshot against live and roll back. It calls no model provider.

room/ TalkBack. A team room for people and AI agents: channels, threads, reactions, mentions, a wire so an AI agent joins as a desk with its own key, huddles, and an Electron shell that hosts the room on your LAN.

Each folder is its own project with its own package.json or requirements.txt.

Rack Community ships no model and no keys. It is the place your models run and report.

To use the sample, copy engine/samples/ask_model.recipe.json into your Rack folder's recipes/ and add ask_model 8 to its peaks.conf.

Admission control. admit.sh admits a job only if max(live memory in use, declared total) + the job's peak <= LIMIT. The declared total is a base figure plus the declared peaks of admitted jobs that are still alive, so two jobs that have not yet touched memory cannot both be admitted into the same gap. A refused job exits 75 and says why. Peaks live in peaks.conf; ADMIT_LIMIT (default 90) and ADMIT_BASE (default 10) are in GB.

Durable pieces. A job is split into named pieces. Each piece result is written atomically and in order, so a crash, a restart or a pause resumes at the first piece that was not saved. A supervisor outside the worker enforces a wall-clock limit per piece, including a worker stuck in a native call.

Dry-run first. The Rack starts in dry-run: every request is validated and recorded and nothing changes. Switching to LIVE is one explicit action. Pause writes a single HOLD marker; work queued before the pause waits, new starts are refused while it exists.

Recipes, not commands. A start names a recipe from recipes/*.json. No endpoint accepts a command line, a path or a shell string.

{"action": "nightly_index", "label": "Rebuild the search index", "script": "samples/hello_pieces.py", "args": [], "admission": "nightly_index", "peak_gb": 4}

Add the recipe file, add nightly_index 4 to peaks.conf, and write the script with from rack_jobs import from_environment. See engine/samples/ for complete examples. More detail in docs/ARCHITECTURE.md.

The API needs the X-Rack-Token header for every write and for the two reads that show your log lines. With no RACK_TOKEN set, nothing unlocks.

Bind everything to 127.0.0.1, or put it behind your own access boundary. Do not expose it to the internet as it is.

Somnus and TalkBack have no sign-in. They run as one local owner. Their server functions refuse requests that a browser reports as started by another site, but they are not a multi-user service.

The panel keeps the token in sessionStorage for one tab and never puts it in a URL, a body or a log. Workers never receive it.

Admission, pause and the recipe list are safety rails, not a sandbox: a recipe script runs as the user who started the actor.

Somnus and TalkBack on their own

Use a different port from the panel:

cd memory && npm install && npm run dev -- --port 8081 # http://127.0.0.1:8081 cd room && npm install && npm run dev -- --port 8082 # http://127.0.0.1:8082

Somnus keeps its state in an embedded database, in memory by default; set PGLITE_DATA_DIR to keep it. TalkBack's desktop shell is described in room/desktop/README-DESKTOP.md.

Run the narrowest check that covers what you changed.

cd engine && python3 -m pytest -q tests # 38 tests cd panel && npx tsc --noEmit && npm test # 19 tests cd memory && npx tsc --noEmit && npm test # 39 tests cd room && npx tsc --noEmit && npm test # 61 tests

Those are unit and small integration tests. There is no browser end-to-end suite in this repository, and the full test suites of the original apps were not carried over (see "What is not here").

No company-specific assistant, recipes, prompts, data or customer material. This is the general-purpose part only.

The engine was rewritten from the mechanisms of a private lab (the admission rule, ordered atomic pieces, external deadlines, a pause that holds starts, dry-run first). It is not a cleaned copy of that code.

The web apps in panel/, memory/ and room/ started from an app template whose licence we could not establish. Its sign-in layer, install-page scripts and the tests that only exercised them were removed before this release, and the apps now run as one local owner. Some template-era source files remain in the apps; see NOTICE.

Somnus's Backup page and checkpoint tool were removed because they copied files specific to one machine. The TalkBack relay has no authentication of its own (see room/relay/README.md).

Version 1.0.0 is a first public release. Expect rough edges.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. Keep changes small, keep the safety rails (admission, dry-run, token-checked writes) intact, and say which tests you ran.

MIT. See LICENSE and NOTICE. Copyright (c) Rack Community contributors.