Files
homelab/ansible/roles/honcho
Hermes Agent service account 23612a38f2 honcho: enable OpenAI embeddings for conclusion vectorisation
- Add vault_honcho_openai_api_key (embeddings-only, Honcho-scoped)
- Inject OPENAI_API_KEY + LLM_OPENAI_API_KEY into api + deriver containers
- Flip honcho_embed_messages default to true now that embeddings have a provider
- Parameterise EMBEDDING__MODEL_CONFIG__{TRANSPORT,MODEL,BASE_URL} so we can
  later swap to a local OpenAI-compatible embedder (e.g. Ollama on
  astro-orbiter post-rebuild) with a single defaults change.

Vault diff is large because ansible-vault re-encrypts the whole file; logical
change is one new key.
2026-05-31 22:29:03 -05:00
..

Honcho role

Deploys Honcho — Plastic Labs' memory + theory-of-mind layer for stateful agents — on a single mk-labs VM (lincoln) using rootful Podman + Quadlet.

Topology

                                 ┌──────────────────────────────┐
                                 │  lightning-lane (Traefik)    │
                                 │  hall-of-presidents.l...     │
                                 └─────────────┬────────────────┘
                                               │
                                               │  HTTP :8000
                                               ▼
   ┌──────────────────────────────── lincoln ───────────────────────────────┐
   │                                                                        │
   │   ┌───────────────┐    ┌───────────────┐    ┌──────────────────────┐   │
   │   │ honcho-api    │    │ honcho-deriver│    │ honcho-postgres      │   │
   │   │ (FastAPI:8000)│◄──►│ (worker loop) │◄──►│ pgvector/pgvector:pg16│  │
   │   └──────┬────────┘    └──────┬────────┘    └──────────────────────┘   │
   │          │                    │                                        │
   │          └────────┬───────────┘                                        │
   │                   ▼                                                    │
   │            Anthropic Claude API (outbound, east-west to Internet)      │
   │                                                                        │
   └────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

What this role does

  1. Installs Podman + ensures the rootful Quadlet drop-in dir exists.
  2. Creates a user-defined Podman network (honcho-net).
  3. Creates a named volume for Postgres data (honcho_postgres_data).
  4. Deploys a pgvector-enabled Postgres 16 container and waits for it to be ready.
  5. Deploys the Honcho API container (honcho-api) — FastAPI on :8000.
  6. Deploys the Honcho deriver worker container (honcho-deriver).
  7. Verifies the API answers on /docs.

Required vault entries

Add to group_vars/all/vault (ansible-vault encrypted):

vault_honcho_database_password: "<strong random>"
vault_honcho_jwt_secret: "<32+ byte random>"
vault_honcho_anthropic_api_key: "sk-ant-..."

LLM provider switching

This role starts with Anthropic Claude. To swap to a local OpenAI-compatible endpoint later (e.g. astro-orbiter once we have the GPU running llama.cpp/Ollama in OpenAI-compatible mode), override these in group_vars/honcho_server or via a playbook variable:

honcho_llm_transport: "openai"
honcho_deriver_model:   "qwen3:8b"
honcho_summary_model:   "qwen3:8b"
honcho_dialectic_model: "qwen3:8b"
# and add LLM_OPENAI_API_KEY (or set the base URL override in the template)

Traefik route

The Traefik file-provider YAML for hall-of-presidents.local.mk-labs.cloud lives at boilerplates/traefik/dynamic/honcho.yml. It points at http://lincoln.local.mk-labs.cloud:8000.

Known Quadlet pitfall (carried from the semaphore role)

Quadlet regenerates the systemd unit on .container file change but does NOT restart the running container. This role explicitly handles that by gating a state: restarted task on the template's changed status — the same pattern documented in homelab-application-deployment's quadlet-patterns reference.

Honcho version pinning

The honcho_image default is ghcr.io/plastic-labs/honcho:latest. Move to a digest-pinned tag once we've validated the deployment works against a known-good build.