Self-Hosting an AI Assistant on CasaOS: A Step-by-Step OpenMuse Install Guide (Pitfalls Included)
How to deploy OpenMuse — a self-hosted AI chat assistant that can also manage your CasaOS server — using SSH and Docker Compose. Every step below exists because we did it the wrong way first. What you're building A home server running CasaOS (this guide was tested on v0.4.9) gets a conversational AI assistant living on the same box — one that doesn't just chat, but can list your apps, read logs,…
Deploying OpenMuse, a conversational AI assistant, on your CasaOS server requires SSH access and Docker Compose. The assistant can list your apps, read logs, and control containers with your approval. To begin, open an SSH connection to your server. Before proceeding, ensure that ports 8787, 8081, and 8790 are available by checking for any conflicting processes or containers.
Create a dedicated directory, /DATA/AppData/openmuse, and clone the OpenMuse source code into the repo/ subdirectory. Next, create three Dockerfiles for the api, web, and worker containers, as well as a .env file and a data/ directory for app database and library files. The docker-compose.yaml file orchestrates the three containers, specifying their build context, image names, ports, volumes, and health checks.
Run docker-compose up to start the containers. The api container manages the Node.js server and agent brain, while the web container serves the chat UI via nginx. The browser-worker container runs a sandboxed browser for handling web tasks. With OpenMuse installed, you can interact with your AI assistant using the chat UI at http://server-lan-ip:8081.
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