Self-hosting

The akari server is a single Linux binary backed by Postgres. It embeds its own UI, fonts, and database migrations. This chapter covers standing it up, configuring it, and the operations it needs over its life. (The client that pushes sessions to it runs anywhere and is its own chapter.)

Running the server

With Docker Compose

The bundled docker-compose.yml brings up Postgres and the server together and is the quickest way to a running instance:

docker compose up -d --build

It starts Postgres 18 and the server, which applies its migrations on startup and listens on :8080. The compose file runs in plain-HTTP development mode (AKARI_COOKIE_INSECURE=1) and ships throwaway database credentials; change both before exposing it. For anything real, terminate TLS at a reverse proxy in front (see Production) and point the server at a Postgres you manage rather than the bundled container.

With the install script (systemd)

On a Linux host, the server install script downloads a checksum-verified binary and, with --systemd, wires it up as a managed service:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jssblck/akari/main/scripts/install-server.sh | sh -s -- --systemd

That installs a dedicated akari user, a akari-server systemd service, and an environment file at /etc/akari/server.env where you set the configuration below. Manage it the usual way:

sudo systemctl start akari-server
sudo systemctl status akari-server
sudo systemctl restart akari-server

From source

With a Go toolchain and a reachable Postgres:

go generate ./...                         # regenerate templated error pages (gitignored)
go build -o akari-server ./cmd/akari-server
export AKARI_DATABASE_URL="postgres://akari:akari@localhost:5432/akari?sslmode=disable"
./akari-server

The server applies its embedded migrations on startup, so there is no separate migration step, and a restart is always safe.

Configuration

The server is configured entirely from the environment; there is no config file. Only the database URL is required.

Variable	Default	Meaning
`AKARI_DATABASE_URL`	(required)	Postgres connection string, for example `postgres://akari:akari@localhost:5432/akari?sslmode=disable`.
`AKARI_LISTEN`	`:8080`	Address the HTTP server binds. Falls back to `PORT` when unset.
`AKARI_PUBLIC_URL`	(derived)	The externally reachable base URL (`https://akari.example.com`). It is the OAuth issuer, the base of the URLs the MCP authorization flow advertises, and the trusted origin for browser writes. It may carry a path (`https://ops.example.com/akari`) when a reverse proxy serves akari under a prefix; see Serving under a path prefix. Query, fragment, and user information are rejected. When unset the server derives the origin per request, which suits local dev where the server is reached on more than one loopback port. Set it explicitly in production.
`AKARI_PREFIX_HEADER`	unset	The request header a trusted reverse proxy sets to the external path prefix it serves akari under (for example `X-Forwarded-Prefix`). When set, the prefix resolves per request from that header, so one instance can be mounted wherever the proxy chooses without a restart. Only safe when akari is reachable exclusively through the proxy; when `AKARI_PROXY_AUTH_SECRET` is set, the header is honored only on requests whose secret matches. See Serving under a path prefix.
`AKARI_MCP_RESPONSE_BUDGET_BYTES`	`8388608`	Maximum encoded MCP tool result in bytes. Transcript pages stop at a message boundary before this limit; oversized message fields become authenticated content references. Must be between 8388608 (8 MiB) and 16777216 (16 MiB).
`AKARI_COOKIE_INSECURE`	unset	Set truthy to drop the `Secure` flag on session cookies, for plain-HTTP local development. Leave unset in production so cookies are HTTPS-only.
`AKARI_PROXY_AUTH_HEADER`	unset	Enables reverse-proxy single sign-on. The request header a trusted proxy in front sets to the authenticated username (for example `X-Auth-Request-Preferred-Username`). When set, akari trusts that header as the signed-in user and provisions the account on first sight. Leave unset for a direct, locally-authenticated deployment. See Single sign-on behind a trusted proxy.
`AKARI_PROXY_AUTH_SECRET`	unset	Optional shared secret the proxy must echo (in `AKARI_PROXY_AUTH_SECRET_HEADER`) for the identity header to be trusted. Defense in depth for when network isolation alone is not enough. Only consulted when `AKARI_PROXY_AUTH_HEADER` is set.
`AKARI_PROXY_AUTH_SECRET_HEADER`	`X-Akari-Proxy-Secret`	The header carrying `AKARI_PROXY_AUTH_SECRET`. Only consulted when that secret is set.
`AKARI_PASSWORD_WORKERS`	`2`	Maximum Argon2 password hashes and verifications running at once. Each worker can use 64 MiB, so size this from the memory available to the server. Must be positive.
`AKARI_PASSWORD_QUEUE_DEPTH`	`32`	Maximum password operations waiting behind active workers. Requests beyond this bound fail closed. Must be positive.
`AKARI_PASSWORD_QUEUE_TIMEOUT`	`3s`	Maximum time an admitted password operation waits for a worker. A Go duration; must be positive.
`AKARI_SWEEP_INTERVAL`	`1h`	How often the server reclaims orphaned content-addressed blobs. A Go duration (`30m`, `2h`); `0` disables the background sweep.
`AKARI_OG_CACHE_TTL`	`1h`	How long a rendered Open Graph preview card of a published overview is served from cache before the next request re-renders it. A Go duration; must be positive.
`AKARI_OG_CLEANUP_INTERVAL`	`24h`	How often the server prunes expired preview cards (older than `AKARI_OG_CACHE_TTL`) from the cache. A Go duration; `0` disables the sweep.
`AKARI_INSIGHTS_REFRESH_INTERVAL`	`1h`	How often the fleet Insights snapshot recomputes in the background. Every trailing window recomputes together in one pass, so the range views cannot drift apart; the page notes the snapshot’s age beside its range selector. A Go duration; `0` disables the background loop (the snapshot then computes on first request and when a reparse completes).
`AKARI_SIGNALS_SETTLE_INTERVAL`	`5m`	How often the server computes per-session quality signals (outcome, grade, prompt hygiene, context health) for sessions that have settled: a session is graded once it has been idle past the abandoned threshold (30 minutes), off the ingest path, so a live session is never graded with a verdict that would drift. A session an ephemeral host declared terminal (`akari sync --finalize`) is graded immediately instead, both by this pass and by the finalize call the client makes at the end of the sync, so the grade lands before the host is torn down. A Go duration; `0` disables the background pass (signals then land only on reparse, the finalize call, or `akari-server settle`).
`AKARI_REQUEST_BUDGET_CAPACITY`	`16`	Process-wide weighted capacity for expensive public work. Must be at least `12`, the weight of one maximum-sized MCP POST under the 100 MiB ceiling tracked by issue #134. Password work weighs `8`, public analytics `4`, MCP POST parsing and spooling `12`, and dynamic OAuth registration `1`.
`AKARI_REQUEST_BUDGET_WAIT_TIMEOUT`	`5s`	Maximum time expensive work waits for capacity. A timed-out request receives HTTP 503 with `Retry-After: 1`. Must be a positive Go duration.
`AKARI_OAUTH_REGISTRATIONS_PER_HOUR`	`1000`	Abuse ceiling for successful dynamic OAuth client registrations in a rolling hour. Postgres coordinates this limit across all server replicas. Excess registrations receive HTTP 429 with `Retry-After: 3600`.

Browser origin and reverse proxies

akari rejects unsafe browser requests unless they come from its public origin. This applies to login and registration as well as signed-in account, publication, OAuth consent, and other mutations. Origin, when present, must exactly match the configured origin. Sec-Fetch-Site, when present, must be same-origin; a same-site sibling is rejected. A malformed or conflicting header is always rejected.

The built-in forms also send a double-submit token. It is the fallback when a client or proxy path omits both browser headers. A non-browser client that must use a session cookie can first load a form page, retain the akari_csrf cookie, then echo its value in X-Akari-CSRF-Token on the write. API clients should use Bearer tokens instead. Bearer-authenticated ingest and MCP requests do not use the cookie CSRF gate, and neither do the public OAuth registration and token protocol endpoints.

Set AKARI_PUBLIC_URL to the browser-visible origin in production, especially when TLS terminates at a reverse proxy:

AKARI_PUBLIC_URL=https://akari.example.com

With that setting, akari compares browser requests to the configured value and does not use the internal upstream address. If it is unset, akari derives the origin from the request’s TLS state or X-Forwarded-Proto, plus Host. A reverse proxy using derived mode must overwrite both headers with the values it received on its public listener. Do not append to client-supplied forwarding headers.

The database

akari stores everything in Postgres: raw session bytes, the parsed projection, user accounts, tokens and invites, and content-addressed blobs (as large objects). Postgres 18 is what the compose file and CI use.

Migrations are embedded in the binary and applied on every startup: the server records each applied migration and runs only the new ones, each in its own transaction, so restarts and upgrades need no manual database step. Back it up like any Postgres database on your normal schedule; a standard pg_dump that includes large objects captures the blobs along with everything else.

The first account

Registration is closed and invite-gated, with one bootstrap exception: the first account registered on a fresh server needs no invite and becomes the admin. Open the server in a browser and register to claim it. That account can then mint invite tokens (Account page) for everyone else, who redeem them when they register. The full account and token model is Accounts and sharing.

Login and registration share the password-work limits above. Unknown usernames run a dummy Argon2 verification after admission, so an invalid login does not expose whether the account exists through the ordinary fast path. Process-local abuse ceilings also bound sustained attempts per normalized username and direct network peer. Akari does not trust X-Forwarded-For for this purpose; deployments with several replicas should enforce a fleet-wide source limit at the trusted edge as well.

Behind a reverse proxy, the per-source limit becomes a single shared bucket. Every request the server sees arrives from the proxy’s own address, so the per-source ceiling stops distinguishing one client from another and instead caps the whole instance’s login and registration traffic together. A busy moment can then 401 legitimate logins with nothing to tell them apart from real credential attacks. The per-username limiter is unaffected and still protects individual accounts. If you need per-client source limits behind a proxy, enforce them there instead: the proxy sees the real client address, akari does not.

Single sign-on behind a trusted proxy

akari’s built-in accounts are local: a username and password per person, invite-gated after the first admin. To run akari inside an environment that already has its own identity (as a sidecar to another application, or behind your organization’s gateway), it can instead trust identity asserted by a reverse proxy in front of it. This is the standard identity-aware-proxy pattern: the proxy authenticates the user against your identity provider, and akari trusts the username it forwards.

How it works

Put an authenticating proxy (oauth2-proxy, Pomerium, or your own gateway) in front of the server. The proxy signs the user in against your IdP and forwards their username in a request header. Set AKARI_PROXY_AUTH_HEADER to that header’s name, and the server will:

read the username from that header on every request,
provision an account the first time it sees a new one (with no password, and not an admin), and
treat the request as that signed-in user at full scope, exactly like a browser session.

Accounts created this way are federated: they have no local password, so the login form refuses them. Their only way in is through the proxy. Everything else (the feed, projects, publishing, and minting API and MCP tokens) behaves the same as for a local account.

Because the proxy authenticates every request, deep-linking a user straight into a page needs no extra step: a link from your other application to https://akari.internal/sessions/123 arrives already authenticated as whoever the proxy says the user is.

The trust boundary

Turning this on means akari believes anyone who can set the identity header. That is safe only when akari is reachable exclusively through the proxy that sets it: a private network, a sidecar sharing a pod, or an ingress that always injects the header. Never expose a proxy-auth instance directly to a network where a client could set the header itself. Configure the proxy to overwrite (not append) the identity header, so a client cannot smuggle its own value through.

For defense in depth, set AKARI_PROXY_AUTH_SECRET to a value shared out of band with the proxy. The proxy must echo it in AKARI_PROXY_AUTH_SECRET_HEADER (default X-Akari-Proxy-Secret), or akari ignores the identity header, so a client that reaches the server directly cannot forge an identity without also knowing the secret. It hardens the boundary; it does not replace network isolation.

Bootstrapping the admin

A proxy-provisioned account is never an admin, and once any account exists local registration is invite-only (which needs an admin to mint the invite). So create the first admin through local password registration before you enable proxy auth: register in a browser to claim the bootstrap admin (see The first account), then set AKARI_PROXY_AUTH_HEADER and restart. Enable proxy auth on a truly empty database and the first proxied request creates an ordinary non-admin account, leaving no admin to mint invites or run a reparse.

Example

With oauth2-proxy in front, forwarding the authenticated username to the akari upstream it protects:

# oauth2-proxy is configured to pass the signed-in user to its upstream, e.g.
#   --pass-user-headers  (sends X-Forwarded-Preferred-Username / X-Auth-Request-*)
# Tell akari which of those headers carries the username:
AKARI_PROXY_AUTH_HEADER=X-Auth-Request-Preferred-Username

Point oauth2-proxy’s upstream at the akari server, and make sure only the proxy can reach akari’s AKARI_LISTEN port (a private network or a shared pod). The exact header name and the flag that emits it vary by proxy and version, so match AKARI_PROXY_AUTH_HEADER to whatever your proxy actually sends.

Native OIDC login (akari as a relying party, provisioning users on first login) and SCIM provisioning are planned, so you will be able to point akari straight at an identity provider and manage the account lifecycle from it. Until then, the reverse-proxy pattern above is the supported integration.

Serving under a path prefix

akari does not have to own its origin: a reverse proxy can mount it under any path, so https://ops.example.com/tools/akari/ works beside whatever else the host serves. Tell akari the prefix one of two ways:

Statically, by putting the path in AKARI_PUBLIC_URL:

AKARI_PUBLIC_URL=https://ops.example.com/tools/akari

Per request, by setting AKARI_PREFIX_HEADER to a header your proxy sets to the mount path (most proxies call it X-Forwarded-Prefix):
```
AKARI_PREFIX_HEADER=X-Forwarded-Prefix
```
The header form needs no restart to move the mount and lets one instance be reached under a prefix through the proxy and at the root directly (a request without the header resolves no prefix). It carries the same trust rule as proxy single sign-on: only enable it when akari is reachable exclusively through the proxy, and if AKARI_PROXY_AUTH_SECRET is set the prefix header counts only on requests that carry the matching secret. Set the header on every request forwarded under the mount: cookie Path scopes follow the resolved prefix, so a mount whose requests carry the header inconsistently would mint cookies that other requests never present.

With a prefix resolved, akari accepts the forwarded path stripped or unstripped (proxies differ; both route the same), generates every URL under the prefix (redirects, asset and API paths in served pages, Open Graph tags, and the OAuth discovery documents), and scopes its session and CSRF cookies to the prefix so sibling applications on the same origin never receive them.

A Caddy mount looks like:

ops.example.com {
	handle /tools/akari/* {
		reverse_proxy localhost:8080 {
			header_up X-Forwarded-Prefix /tools/akari
		}
	}
}

Two paths live outside the prefix and deserve a thought:

MCP OAuth discovery. RFC 8414 and RFC 9728 put well-known documents at the origin root with the mount path appended, so an MCP client connecting to https://ops.example.com/tools/akari/mcp fetches /.well-known/oauth-authorization-server/tools/akari. akari answers those suffixed paths; the proxy must forward /.well-known/oauth-* to akari for agent OAuth connections to work. The suffix itself names the mount, so this forwarding rule does not need to set the prefix header. Tokens pasted manually need nothing extra.
/favicon.ico. Browsers probe the origin root for it unprompted. Pages link the icon under the prefix, so tabs render it either way; the root probe belongs to whatever owns the root of that origin.

Ingest and MCP clients need no special handling: point them at the prefixed base URL (akari client server = https://ops.example.com/tools/akari) and they join their API paths under it.

Reparse

The server keeps each session’s raw bytes and a projection parsed out of them, and can rebuild the projection from the bytes at any time (a reparse). It runs one on its own when its parser changes: a new binary compares a compiled-in parser epoch against the epoch the stored data was built under and, when they differ, reparses in the background on startup while it keeps serving. There is no manual step after a parser upgrade.

You can also force one:

From the Account page, an admin can trigger a reparse and watch its progress on a live bar.

From the CLI:

akari-server reparse                 # rebuild every projection from stored raw bytes
akari-server reparse --agent claude  # limit to one agent

While a reparse runs, the parsed pages show a progress notice instead of a half-rebuilt view; the Account page and raw-byte reads stay available throughout. A reparse sweeps orphaned blobs when it finishes.

Maintenance subcommands

The server binary carries a few operational subcommands beside the default run-the-server behavior:

akari-server                  # run the HTTP server (default)
akari-server reparse          # force a projection rebuild (see above)
akari-server sweep            # reclaim orphaned content-addressed blobs now
akari-server settle           # compute quality signals for every settled session now
akari-server dev-seed         # fill a local server with example data (development)
akari-server version          # print the build version and exit

sweep is the manual form of the periodic blob reclaim; it is safe to run any time, since blob liveness is computed rather than reference-counted. settle is the manual form of the periodic signals pass: it grades every settled session missing a current-version signals row, then exits.

dev-seed is a development convenience: it creates a few demo accounts (sign in as grace, the admin, with password akari-dev) and ingests this machine’s real agent sessions. It is idempotent (a no-op once the store holds sessions) and best-effort by default. Keep it away from any server holding real data.

Upgrading

The server has no self-update command. The deployment mechanism that owns the server process also owns upgrades. Pin the replacement to a release tag so the running code and its reported version are reproducible.

Container deployment

Pull the current stable image from GitHub Container Registry and redeploy it through the same container orchestrator that runs the current image. Release images support Linux amd64 and arm64:

docker pull ghcr.io/jssblck/akari-server:latest
docker run --rm ghcr.io/jssblck/akari-server:latest --version
docker image inspect --format '{{index .RepoDigests 0}}' \
  ghcr.io/jssblck/akari-server:latest

Update the deployment to that image. Production deployments can replace latest with vX.Y.Z or, when the deployed bytes must remain fixed across release-workflow reruns, the digest printed above. Do not replace a binary inside a running container; the next container restart would restore the old image contents.

Package or managed binary

When a package manager owns the server, install the selected package version and restart the service through that package’s normal supervisor integration.

For the systemd installation created by install-server.sh, run the installer from the release tag you intend to deploy and pass that same tag as AKARI_VERSION, then restart the service:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jssblck/akari/v0.1.0/scripts/install-server.sh \
  | sudo AKARI_VERSION=v0.1.0 AKARI_INSTALL_DIR=/usr/local/bin sh
sudo systemctl restart akari-server
akari-server version

The installer verifies the release archive against its published checksum before replacing the binary. Existing /etc/akari/server.env configuration is unchanged, and the replacement server applies embedded database migrations when it starts. The same sequence works with another service supervisor: install a specific checksum-verified release archive, restart the managed process, and verify its reported version.

Production

A short checklist for a real deployment:

Terminate TLS at a reverse proxy (nginx, Caddy, and the like) in front of the server, which itself speaks plain HTTP. Forward to its AKARI_LISTEN address.
Set AKARI_PUBLIC_URL to the external HTTPS origin so the MCP OAuth flow advertises correct URLs.
Leave AKARI_COOKIE_INSECURE unset so session cookies are marked Secure and ride only over HTTPS.
Point AKARI_DATABASE_URL at a managed Postgres, not the bundled container, and back it up on your normal schedule.
Capture logs through your container runtime or systemd; the server logs to standard output and error.
Scrape /metrics for request-budget queue depth, wait time, rejection counts, and per-class utilization. The Prometheus text response contains no user or request identifiers. The endpoint is unauthenticated by design (a scraper needs no credential), so it should not be publicly reachable; restrict it to your metrics collector at the reverse proxy.
If you use reverse-proxy single sign-on, make sure the server is reachable only through the proxy that sets the identity header (see Single sign-on behind a trusted proxy).

The server shuts down gracefully on interrupt: it drains in-flight requests and lets background work (sweep, card refresh, any reparse) wind down before the connection pool closes.

The weighted request budget is process-local. Each replica protects its own CPU, memory, temporary disk, and database concurrency, so aggregate admission capacity scales with the replica count. The dynamic OAuth registration ceiling is serialized in Postgres and remains deployment-wide.

Next: Glossary -> the terms the guide uses, for reference.