2026-08-16 22:25 UTCIn-site rewrite3 min readUpdated: 2026-08-16 23:00 UTC

Smarter – Open-Source, Declarative AI Authoring Platform (Django, K8s-Inspired)

Smarter is an open-source platform for building and running enterprise AI systems. Instead of writing orchestration code, you define agents, prompts, tools, and integrations using YAML manifests, then deploy them through a web UI, CLI, API, or Kubernetes.

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Smarter is used as an instructional tool at University of British Columbia for teaching AI.

Why Smarter?

Smarter replaces scattered AI orchestration code with a single declarative system for defining, testing, and running AI workflows across environments.

At a Glance

1-click Quickstart deployment with Docker.

Define AI resources declaratively using YAML manifests.

Connect LLMs to APIs and SQL databases without writing custom orchestration code.

command-line interface for Windows, macOS, Linux and Docker

rest api

web console / prompt engineer workbench

SDKs, UI components, CLI tools, and IDE integrations for building on Smarter

publicly accessible online documentation and self onboarding resources

open source UI components for jump starting projects

Quickstart

This setup uses Docker and takes around 20 minutes for first time installations.

Verify project requirements:

Windows, macOS, Linux operating system

20Gib disk storage capacity

4Gib system memory

Python 3.13

Docker,

Docker Compose.

Add your credentials to .env in the root of this repo. See the inline documentation for details on the minimum environment variables that you will need to set.

Initialize, build and run the application locally.

git clone https://github.com/smarter-sh/smarter make help # scaffolds a .env file in the root of the repo #

****************************

STOP HERE!

****************************

Add your credentials to .env located in the project root folder.

# make init # pulls Docker containers, creates a Python virtual environment,

installs all packages, creates and initializes a

local MySql database, preloads example AI resources

make run # runs all docker containers and starts a

local web server http://localhost:9357/

See these onboarding videos:

Smarter Developer Onboarding I

Smarter Developer Onboarding II

Smarter Developer Workflow Tutorial

Key Features

Smarter implements a yaml manifest-based approach to managing AI resources that is inspired by the Kubernetes project.

It provides a unified, declarative way to define, configure, and orchestrate the disparate resources that are required for creating and managing AI resources that integrate to other enterprise resources like REST API's and Sql databases. And it gives prompt engineering teams an intuitive workbench approach to designing, prototyping, testing, deploying and managing powerful AI resources for common corporate use cases including agentic workflows, customer facing chat solutions, and more. It includes a separately managed React-based chat UI that is compatible with a wide variety of front end ecosystems including NPM, Wordpress, Squarespace, Drupal, Office 365, Sharepoint, .Net, Netsuite, salesforce.com, and SAP. There is a Golang command-line interface, and a PyPi package for integrating the API functions into your own Python projects. It is developed to support prompt engineering teams working in large organizations. Accordingly, Smarter provides common enterprise features such as credentials management, team workgroup management, role-based security, accounting cost codes, and logging and audit capabilities.

Smarter provides seamless integration and interoperation between LLMs from DeepSeek, Google AI, Meta AI and OpenAI. It is LLM provider-agnostic, and provides seamless integrations to a continuously evolving list of value added services for security management, prompt content moderation, audit, cost accounting, and workflow management. Smarter is cloud native and runs on Kubernetes, on-site in your data center or in the cloud.

Smarter is cost effective when running at scale. It is extensible and architected on the philosophy of a compact core that does not require customization nor forking. It is horizontally scalable. It is natively multi-tenant, and can be installed alongside your existing systems. ## Quickstart

Helm Chart

See ghcr.io/smarter-sh/charts/smarter or Artifact Hub.

Documentation

Read the Docs: docs.smarter.sh

Support

Please report bugs to the GitHub Issues Page for this project.

Contributing

Please see the CONTRIBUTING.

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