ForgeGuard Hermes Agent

ForgeGuard maintains a distribution of Hermes Agent, the self-improving AI agent built by Nous Research. The upstream product — the agent runtime, its providers, tools, messaging gateway, and desktop app — is owned and documented by Nous Research. ForgeGuard adds a packaging and release overlay on top of tagged upstream releases: versioned runtime and CLI container images on GHCR and desktop installers attached to each fork release.

This documentation covers only the ForgeGuard distribution artifacts. For how Hermes itself works — configuration, providers, skills, memory, the messaging gateway, security model — follow the links to the upstream product documentation.

This is a maintained fork. ForgeGuard tracks upstream tagged releases and publishes its own artifacts; it does not change how the Hermes agent behaves. Core Hermes behaviour and product documentation remain upstream-owned. See How ForgeGuard relates to upstream.

Choose a task

Choose an artifact — decide between the runtime image, the CLI image, and the desktop app: Choose a ForgeGuard artifact.
Run a persistent agent — a supervised server with a web dashboard and durable state: Runtime images.
Use the CLI image — an interactive terminal install via distrobox: Distrobox / CLI image.
Install desktop artifacts — Linux and macOS builds of Hermes Desktop: Desktop artifacts.
Upgrade safely — understand tags and roll back cleanly: Releases and upgrades.
Understand the fork — what ForgeGuard adds and how versions map: ForgeGuard changes · Compatibility.

Sections

Section	Contents
Getting started	Pick the right ForgeGuard artifact for your use case.
Deployment	Runtime images, the distrobox CLI image, and desktop installers.
Operations	Dashboard authentication, persistence and backups, releases and upgrades.
Reference	Image tag families and platform/version compatibility.
Troubleshooting	Fixing common issues with ForgeGuard artifacts.
Fork	What ForgeGuard changes, compatibility, upstream relationship, and migration.

Where to file issues

Report problems with ForgeGuard artifacts (the GHCR images, the desktop installers, the release/versioning scheme, or ForgeGuard-only container behaviour) to forgeguard-ai/hermes-agent. Report bugs in Hermes itself — behaviour reproducible on an upstream install — to NousResearch/hermes-agent. See How ForgeGuard relates to upstream for the full boundary and the reproduce-on-upstream-first guidance.