GUI

You can invoke the AEA Command Line Interface (CLI) from a Graphical User Interface (GUI) accessed from a web browser.

These instructions will take you through building an AEA and running the AEA - all from the GUI.

Preliminaries

Follow the Preliminaries and Installation instructions here.

Install the extra dependencies for the CLI GUI.

pip install aea[cli_gui]

Starting the GUI

Go to the directory in which you will create new AEAs. If you followed the quick start guide, this will be my_aea. It is important to start the GUI not from within an agent project but its parent directory instead.

Start the local web-server.

aea gui

Open this page in a browser: http://127.0.0.1:8001

You should see the following page.

On the left-hand side we can see any AEAs you have created and beneath that the protocols, connections and skills they have. Initially this will be empty - unless you have followed the quick start guide previously and not deleted those AEAs.

On the right-hand side is a search interface to the Registry which gives you access to protocols, connections, and skills which are available to add to your AEA.

To create a new AEA and run it, follow these steps.

1. In the [Create Agent id] box on the left. type the name of your AEA - e.g. my_new_aea.
2. Click the [Create Agent] button - the newly created AEA should appear in the [Local Agents] table. This should now be the currently selected AEA - but you can click on its name in the list to make sure.
3. Click in the search input box and type "echo"
4. Click the [Search] button - this will list all the skills with echo in their name or description. Note that at present this search functionality is not working and it will list all the skills

1. Find the Echo skill and click on it - this will select it.

2. Click on the [Add skill] button - which should now say "Add echo skill to my_new_aea agent".

3. Start the AEA running by clicking on the [start agent] button. You should see the output from the echo AEA appearing on the screen.

This is how your whole page should look if you followed the instructions correctly.