OpenDots

Self-hosted AI coworkers with shared documents, chat and calls.

Overview

OpenDots is a personal-agent workspace from the CopilotKit team. A Space is a home for working documents: a searchable library of pages you edit in a focused editor with formatting, slash commands and autosave. A Dot is a specialist agent with a name, a role, instructions and a set of permitted tools, which you talk to in text or on a call, can give MCP connections to, and can ask to draft a page that you approve before it is saved. It is built with CopilotKit and AG-UI, and upstream describes it as an alpha template rather than a finished product.

Upstream publishes no container image: the repository ships a Dockerfile but nothing builds or pushes it, and there is no tag or release. This template builds the app target of that Dockerfile from a pinned commit (see ./Dockerfile). It is the upstream application behind an HTTPS face, not a reimplementation.

Two parts of upstream are deliberately not here, and both are additions rather than repairs:

• The isolated browser worker (upstream's browser Dockerfile target, a Playwright Chromium service used by WEB_SEARCH_PROVIDER=browser). A template directory builds one image, and the default parallel search provider needs no second service.
• Dot computers. Each Dot's own computer is an OpenBot container supervisor that creates and execs into containers, which needs a Docker engine a compute machine does not provide. COMPUTER_SUPERVISOR_URL is left unset, so the Computer panel stays unconfigured.

What you get by hosting it

• The web app behind one HTTPS URL, with a single owner token in front of its whole API.
• Spaces and pages: a document workspace with nested subpages, grid and list views, a visual editor, Markdown source mode and autosave. This half works with no third-party key at all.
• Dots: specialist agents with per-Dot instructions and tool permissions, once you supply an Intelligence key and a model.
• Optional Slack: mention a Dot through a managed CopilotKit Channels connection, with an explicit workspace and user allowlist.
• A persistent volume at /data holding the SQLite database: Spaces, pages, Dots, settings, memories and scheduled tasks, so a restart keeps your work. Conversation history lives in CopilotKit Threads rather than on the volume.
• The scheduled-task runner in-process, firing saved tasks on their own interval, which is why the service is always-on.

What you need before deploying

• An owner access token of your choosing, at least 24 characters. OpenDots' sign-in screen asks for it; it is the app's only password, and the server refuses to start with a shorter one.
• For conversations, calls and scheduled tasks: a CopilotKit Intelligence project key, plus an OpenAI-compatible API key and a model id. Run npx copilotkit@latest login and then npx copilotkit@latest project select for the first. Without all three the app still opens and the document side works; it reports the missing ones on its own setup screen.
• For calls: a realtime speech provider key and model, on top of the three above.
• For Slack: a managed Channels declaration name, your Slack workspace id, and the Slack user ids allowed to mention your Dots. See upstream's Slack setup.

Configuration

Set by the template, not by you: HOST=0.0.0.0 (the platform proxy reaches the service over the network, which is also what makes OWNER_TOKEN mandatory upstream), DATABASE_PATH=/data/opendots.sqlite, OWNER_ID=opendots-owner, and APP_ORIGIN resolved to the service's own HTTPS URL. That last one matters: left unset, the server falls back to the origin it reconstructs from the request, which behind the platform's TLS terminator is the http:// form of the same host, and every browser call would be refused as cross-origin.

The service is always-on. The scheduled-task runner fires from inside the process, and no inbound request would wake a stopped machine for it.

After deploy

1. Open the service URL. The sign-in screen asks for the owner access token; paste OWNER_TOKEN.
2. The workspace opens. Pick a Space, create a page, and write in it. Autosave reports its progress, and the page is on the volume, so it survives a restart.
3. If you set the Intelligence key, the model key and the model id, the Dots answer: open a Dot, ask it something, and it can draft a page for you to approve before it is saved. Without them the app's setup screen names exactly which of the three is missing.
4. For Slack, add the Channels declaration name, your workspace id and the user ids allowed to mention a Dot, then restart the service.

Links

• Architectures: linux/amd64 only. Nothing in the build is architecture-specific, but the arm64 leg has not been run; see the architectures table in the registry README.
• Upstream: https://github.com/CopilotKit/OpenDots, built from commit 625452e06cde74cb25b0ce319e2c1be0488f5a5f.
• Image: ghcr.io/insforge/insta-oss/templates/opendots, built from ./Dockerfile in this directory.
• License: MIT (upstream CopilotKit/OpenDots).