Get started / The console
The console
AgentParley has two surfaces over one backend: a full-featured web console for day-to-day work, and the parley CLI for setup, headless servers, and scripting. Both are thin layers over the same use cases — they can't drift apart.
The console is the complete surface — anything you can configure or run, you can do here. The CLI is a focused subset: first-run, secrets, tokens, agents, and booting the host. Reach for the CLI when there's no browser (a remote box, a deploy script); reach for the console for everything else.
Opening it
Run parley serve and open http://127.0.0.1:8420. On a fresh install you land in the onboarding wizard with no token wall (first-run from localhost only) — it connects a provider, adds a model, sets up embeddings, creates your first agent, and reveals your admin token at the end. After that, the console asks for the admin or read token.
The console at a glance
The left nav has three groups:
Observe
- Timeline — the live, interleaved feed of everything happening across sessions: messages, tool calls, model calls, costs. Catches up over REST, then streams live.
- Sessions — every session with state and source; open one to read its full transcript and trace, see its active channel, or delete it. Full-text transcript search.
- Approvals — the queue of actions waiting on a human decision (e.g. a shell command). Approve or deny here.
Manage
- Agents — create and edit agents: soul, instructions, model, skill allow/deny, subagents, channels. The Parley assistant can co-author a soul or instructions with you.
- Cron — schedule standing missions; pick the agent, schedule, session mode, model, and notify channel. The Parley assistant can co-author the schedule and prompt.
- Skills — every skill the runtime has registered, grouped by the plugin that contributed it; click one for its parameters.
- Usage — token, cost, model, agent, and skill dashboards over a date range, plus budgets.
Configure
- Global — server settings, session knobs (compaction, budgets), and the settings forms plugins contribute.
- Models — the model catalog: providers, chat models, embedding models, with a connectivity test.
- Channels — channel instances (e.g. Telegram) and the pending-sender allowlist.
- Shell targets — local and SSH shell targets agents may run against.
- Secrets — the vault: which secrets are set (values are never shown), rotate or remove.
- Plugins — installed plugins, and the Providers picker where you choose the active implementation per selectable group.
Console vs CLI
Where the two overlap, and where each is the only option:
| Task | Console | CLI |
|---|---|---|
| First-run setup | Onboarding wizard | parley init |
| Run the host | — | parley serve |
| Create / edit agents | Agents | parley agent create|list|rm |
| Schedule missions (cron) | Cron | — (edit cron.yml) |
| Secrets | Settings → Secrets | parley secret set|list|rm |
| Rotate tokens | Settings | parley token rotate |
| Install / select providers | Settings → Plugins / Providers | drop DLL + restart |
| Models, channels, shell targets | Settings | — (edit parley.yaml) |
| Watch sessions, usage, approvals | Observe / Usage / Approvals | — |
| Health check | — | parley doctor |
Anything marked "— (edit ...)" can still be scripted by editing
parley.yaml or an agent's cron.yml directly — the console just gives it a form. See Configuration and CLI reference.