Quickstart

Run your first OpenWalrus agent in under a minute — start the daemon and chat.

This guide gets you from zero to a working agent in under a minute.

1. Start the daemon

The daemon manages agents, tools, and connections in the background:

walrus daemon

On first run, it creates the default configuration at ~/.openwalrus/walrus.toml and scaffolds the directory structure.

In another terminal, connect to the default "assistant" agent:

walrus attach

You're now in an interactive REPL. Type a message and press Enter to chat.

Connect to a named agent:

walrus attach --agent my-agent

Agent definitions live in ~/.openwalrus/agents/ as Markdown files with YAML frontmatter. See agents for details.

By default, OpenWalrus uses DeepSeek. To use a different provider, edit ~/.openwalrus/walrus.toml:

[model.default]
text = "deepseek-chat"

[model.providers.deepseek-chat]
model = "deepseek-chat"
api_key = "your-api-key"

See providers for all supported models, or local inference to run models without API keys.