What is HarnessRouter Community Edition?
HarnessRouter Community Edition is an open-source agent harness infrastructure that lets you plug Codex, Claude Code, and Hermes into your product through a single Agent API—all running on your own infrastructure. Released under Apache 2.0, it packages the Gateway, Runner, and Console into one Docker container, so you can go from image to running in minutes without a managed database, external vault, or cloud account. The API, Console, SQLite state, and workspace files stay on the infrastructure you control, keeping your model provider keys, state, and deliveries firmly in your hands.
Who it's for
- Product engineers building AI-powered features who want to integrate once and switch between leading agent harnesses without rebuilding their backend.
- Self-hosting teams that need full control over their agent infrastructure, provider keys, and data—no cloud lock-in, no external dependencies.
- Platform architects evaluating open protocols who value a versioned, inspectable contract like the Unified Harness Protocol (UHP) with 52 runnable conformance checks.
Key features
One API for leading harnesses
Integrate once, then select the harness for each task—Codex by OpenAI, Claude Code by Anthropic, or Hermes by Nous Research—and switch without touching your product backend. The shared contract abstracts away harness-specific differences, so your integration stays stable even as underlying tools evolve.
Complete agent lifecycle
HarnessRouter handles the backend lifecycle around each harness, not just the initial model request. Sessions can be created, resumed, and inspected; tokens and events stream in real time; files upload and persist in workspaces; artifacts return as finished outputs; cancellation stops running work through one contract; and structured errors are handled consistently across all harnesses.
Unified Harness Protocol (UHP)
UHP is the public, versioned contract that makes harness implementations portable, inspectable, and independently testable. It includes a stable HTTP spec, OpenAPI 3.1 machine-readable definitions, JSON Schema 2020-12 contracts for every object, and 52 runnable checks you can verify locally—no lock-in, no guesswork.
Starter Kit with working examples
Instead of starting from an empty repo, explore complete reference demos and production kits. The Cursor-style coding app shows project-aware tasks, streamed output, persistent sessions, follow-up work, cancellation, and generated-file downloads. LumaCare applies the same architecture to a family-care product, and the Slides Kit offers a conversational copilot with templates and deck validation—all launchable from the HarnessRouter Console.
What stands out
One container, one API, your infrastructure—agent harnesses without the rebuild.
That's the core promise: HarnessRouter collapses the complexity of running multiple agent harnesses into a single Docker container and a single API contract. You get production-grade lifecycle handling—sessions, streaming, files, artifacts, cancellation, failure recovery—without stitching together disparate tools. And because it's Apache 2.0 with a public protocol, you're never locked into a vendor's roadmap; you can verify conformance locally and move freely between harnesses as your needs change.
Worth checking out if…
You're building a product that needs agent capabilities and want to avoid re-architecting every time a new harness emerges. If you value self-hosting, data control, and open standards, HarnessRouter Community Edition gives you a production-ready foundation with starter apps to accelerate your first implementation.
