Documentation

CoStaff Documentation

Self-host a multi-agent system on your own machine. These docs walk you through installing CoStaff, configuring it, and adding specialist agents and chat channels.

CoStaff is a multi-agent orchestrator: one Manager Agent dispatches work to specialist agents (Business Analysis, Coding, Database, custom) over A2A, while the specialists call MCP tools to do the actual work. Everything runs in Docker on your machine.

If you just want to get going, jump to the install command. If you want the big picture first, the architecture page covers the 6-layer model.

First time here?

Take the Beginner tutorial — a hand-held walkthrough from zero to your first conversation, with the expected output at every step. The pages below are the reference version of the same journey.

01

System requirements

What hardware and software you need before installing.
02

Install

One curl command for macOS or Ubuntu.
03

First-run setup

The costaff onboard wizard: model provider, language, channels.
04

Start CoStaff

Bring the layered stack up with costaff start.
05

Specialist agents

Add the experts that handle each kind of work.
06

Chat channels

Front-door chat apps: WebChat, Telegram, more.
07

Verify the install

Confirm every container is healthy.
08

Troubleshooting

Common gotchas and how to recover.

Quick start

If you already know the stack, this is the whole thing in four commands:

# 1. install
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/costaff-ai/costaff/main/install.sh | bash

# 2. configure (interactive wizard — auto-runs after install when possible)
source ~/.zshrc  # or ~/.bashrc on Ubuntu
costaff onboard

# 3. start everything (preflight-checks your .env first)
costaff start

# 4. open the dashboard and click Chat
costaff dashboard

Then add agents and channels — see Specialist agents and Chat channels.