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, starting an OEF search and communication node, 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.
Start the local web-server.
aea gui
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.
- In the [Create Agent id] box on the left. type the name of your AEA - e.g. my_new_aea.
- 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.
- Click in the search input box and type "echo"
- 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
- Find the Echo skill and click on it - this will select it.
- Click on the [Add skill] button - which should now say "Add echo skill to my_new_aea agent".
- Start an OEF search and communication node by clicking on the [Start OEF Node] button. Wait for the text saying "A thing of beauty is a joy forever..." to appear. When you see that, the node has started successfully.
- 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.
