Install CAMEL with Docker

Docker offers an easy way to create a consistent and isolated virtual environment, containers, for setting up the dependencies of CAMEL. This guide will show you how to quickly set up CAMEL, run the examples, and also develop on it, with Docker.

Prerequisites

• Docker：https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/
• Docker Compose：https://docs.docker.com/compose/install/

Configure Environment

Before starting the container, you need to navigate into the .container folder and create a .env file with your own API keys, so that these keys will be present in the environment variables of the container, which will later be used by CAMEL. The list of API keys that can be found in the .env.example file.

cd .container

# YOU SHOULD EDIT .env FILE TO ADD YOUR OWN API KEYS AFTER THIS
cp .env.example .env

Start Container

After configuring the API keys, simply run the following command to start up the working container. This will automatically set up the environment and dependencies for CAMEL. It may take some time, please be patient.

docker compose up -d

After the build is completed, you can see the image camel:localdev in the list of images, along with a started container, camel-localdev.

# check the list of images
docker images

# check the list of running containers
docker ps

Enter Container

You can enter the container with the following command.

docker compose exec camel bash

Then you will be in the container environment under the CAMEL directory, with all the dependencies installed.

Then You can try running the role_playing.py example.

python examples/ai_society/role_playing.py

If you see the agents interacting with each other, this means you are all set. Have fun with CAMEL in Docker!

Save Your Progress

We support volume mounting in the started container, which means that all of your changes in the CAMEL directory inside the container will be synced into the CAMEL repo on your host system. Therefore, you don't need to worry about losing your progress when you exit the container.

Exit, Stop and Delete the Container

You can simply press Ctrl + D or use the exit command to exit the container.

After exiting the container, under normal cases the container will still be running in the background. If you don't need the container anymore, you can stop and delete the container with the following command.

docker compose down

Online Images

For users who only want to have a quick tryout on CAMEL, we also provide the pre-built images on our GitHub Container Registry. Considering the size of the image, we only offer the image with the basic dependencies.

Note that there are some key differences between the local development image and the pre-built image that you should be aware of.

1. The pre-built image is built upon the source code of each release of CAMEL. This means that they are not suitable for development, as they don't contain the git support. If you want to develop on CAMEL, please build the image by yourself according to the instructions above.
2. The pre-built image only contains the basic dependencies for running the examples. If you want to run the examples that require additional dependencies, you need to install them according to the installation guide in CAMEL's README.
3. The pre-built image doesn't contain the API keys. You need to set up the API keys by yourself in the container environment.
4. The pre-built image does not support volume mounting. This means that all of your changes in the container will be lost when you delete the container.

To quickly start a container with the pre-built image, you can use the following command.

docker run -it -d --name camel ghcr.io/camel-ai/camel:latest

Attach to the container with the following command.

docker exec -it camel bash

After setting the environment, you can run the example with the following command.

python examples/ai_society/role_playing.py