Open Terminal

Open Terminal is an open-source, self-hosted remote shell from Open WebUI that gives AI agents and automation tools somewhere to run code. It exposes command execution, file management and search through a REST API, and can run in a Docker container or directly on a machine with pip. The project is MIT licensed, and its latest listed release is v0.14.0.

What It Is

Open Terminal is an execution environment for AI assistants. Agents can write code, but they need a place to run it; Open Terminal provides a remote shell with file operations and search, reachable over HTTP with an API key. Interactive API documentation is served at /docs once an instance is running.

Deployment Options

The Docker route runs in an isolated container. The default image bundles Python, Node.js, git, build tools, data science libraries, ffmpeg, LibreOffice and LaTeX, and it also ships with the Docker CLI, Compose and Buildx. Slim, Alpine and OpenShift variants are smaller and carry minimal tooling. The OpenShift image targets restricted non-root pod policies.

The bare-metal route installs with pip or runs through uvx. Commands then run with the user's own permissions on the host, so the README recommends Docker when sandboxing is needed.

Configuration and Storage

Settings come from CLI flags, environment variables, user or system TOML config files, or built-in defaults, in that priority order. Extra apt, pip and npm packages can be installed at container startup through environment variables. Workspace files can live on external storage such as Docker volumes, Kubernetes persistent volumes, NFS mounts or FUSE mounts. The file view endpoint can return DOCX and PPTX previews as PDF when LibreOffice is available.

Open WebUI Integration and Multi-User Limits

Open Terminal connects to Open WebUI as an Open Terminal integration, either per user or system-wide by admins. This adds a file navigation sidebar for browsing, uploading, downloading and editing files. An optional multi-user mode gives each user a Linux account and home directory within one container. The README states this separates workspaces but is not a security boundary and is not designed for production multi-user deployments. A separate Terminals project, which requires an Open WebUI Enterprise License for production use, provisions a container per user.