Brigata Studio — Studio to Go

Self-hosted, single-tenant Brigata Studio. One admin, one workspace, one AI agent that runs in-process on your own Anthropic key — on your own machine, with no account on brigata.ai and nothing phoning home.

This is the same Studio engine that powers the hosted product, built in a standalone mode: no Google sign-in, no billing, no cloud provisioning. You log in with a password you set, and everything runs locally.

What you need

• A Linux host (Ubuntu/Debian tested) — a laptop, a mini-PC, or a small VPS.
• Node.js 20+ and PostgreSQL — install steps below.
• An Anthropic API key (sk-ant-api03-…) or a Claude subscription token (sk-ant-oat01-…, from claude setup-token). Your agent runs on this credential — you can run entirely on your Claude Pro/Max subscription, no separate API billing required. Nothing is shared with anyone.

Install the prerequisites

The installer does not install Node or Postgres for you — it checks they're present and sets up the database inside your Postgres. Install them first.

Ubuntu / Debian:

# Postgres (server + client; creates the 'postgres' superuser + starts the service)
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y curl git postgresql

# Node.js 20+ (NodeSource — installs system-wide, works under systemd)
curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_22.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

Fedora / RHEL:

sudo dnf install -y git postgresql-server postgresql
sudo postgresql-setup --initdb
sudo systemctl enable --now postgresql
curl -fsSL https://rpm.nodesource.com/setup_22.x | sudo bash -
sudo dnf install -y nodejs

macOS (Homebrew):

brew install node@22 postgresql@16
brew services start postgresql@16

Verify before continuing (Node must be 20 or higher):

node -v      # v20+  (this setup gives v22 LTS)
psql --version

The installer creates the database role, database, and uuid-ossp extension itself using the local postgres superuser — you don't create them by hand.

Install

git clone https://github.com/0xC/brigata-studio2go.git
cd brigata-studio2go
STANDALONE_ADMIN_PASSWORD='choose-a-long-password' \
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY='sk-ant-...' \
  bash server/install-standalone.sh

The installer checks prerequisites, creates a local Postgres database, applies the schema, writes server/.env, builds the server and the web app, and tells you how to start it.

Then start it:

cd server
node dist/index.standalone.js

Open http://localhost:3030 and sign in with the password you set. The first run seeds one workspace and one agent, so you land in a working studio.

To run it as a background service, re-run the installer with EMIT_SYSTEMD=1 and follow the printed systemctl steps.

Configuration

All settings live in server/.env (created from server/.env.standalone.template):

Running it on a network / the internet

The server binds to 127.0.0.1 by default, which is the safe choice. To reach it from other machines, put a reverse proxy (Caddy or nginx) or a tunnel (cloudflared, tailscale) in front of it and terminate TLS there — then set SESSION_COOKIE_DOMAIN to your hostname. Do not expose the raw port to the internet without TLS.

What's included — and what isn't

Studio to Go is the core Studio runtime: workspaces, channels, agents that run in-process on your key, documents, skills, agent memory, tasks, and the live web UI.

It deliberately leaves out the hosted product's cloud features — team billing, managed Pro VPS provisioning, GitHub document sync, and Discord/Matrix channel connectors. Those depend on brigata.ai's infrastructure and aren't part of a self-hosted install.

Updating

Pull the latest and re-run the installer — it's idempotent and won't clobber your .env or re-apply migrations that already ran.

git pull
bash server/install-standalone.sh   # rebuilds; safe to re-run