How to Set Up Hermes Agent on xCloud | AI Agent Hosting Tutorial

In this video, I'm going to show you how to set up Hermes agent on xCloud hosting. Now, the cool thing about setting it up on xCloud is that it's much, much easier than most hosts. There's very little command line, none if you don't wish. So I'm going to show you how to get it set up. Let's get started. I'm here on my xCloud hosting panel, and the first thing we're going to do is click new server. Now in order for this to work, you have to choose xCloud's managed servers. Uh, you can't use one of these, so I'm going to click that right here. Then we're going to give it a name, then we're going to choose our app type down here and choose Hermes Agent. I'm going to skip tags. Server type, general standard server size. I live nearish Chicago, Ubuntu, backups, etc. And then down here we choose the Agentic web server type and Hermes Agent. These were pre-selected for me. And you should read this security warning because it's important. Um, yeah, I'm not even— I'm not going to go through it. You should read it. Then we choose an LLM provider, and I'm going to choose ChatGPT OAuth. Now, one of the cool things about ChatGPT is that on their end, they do not charge you any more than you're already paying to run, uh, Hermes account. Agents like Claude do, they require an extra API, extra tokens, etc. The model we're going to choose is 5.4 because it doesn't work with 5.5 right now. So, um, in the future, if you're watching this a while after I made it, you may want to give it a shot. It's easy to switch if if it doesn't— still doesn't work when you're doing it. So we choose 5.4. Then we need a ChatGPT OAuth token, and we click right here, generate token, and click connect with OpenAI. And you'll need to log in. I'm already logged in as xCloud Engineering. And then click continue. And this looks like an error, but it's going to localhost. So you want to copy this URL come back to this page and paste it right here and click the exchange code and show token button. And that gives us a token. We copy that, we come back to here and paste it right there. Now you can optionally connect it to Telegram. Uh, we're going to do that. You don't have to. Hermes does not have a web-based interface, chat interface. Like OpenClaw does. So you either need to use something like Telegram or you can use terminal, and I'm going to show you how to do both. So the first thing we need is a bot token. So we come over here to Telegram and you go to the user Botfather, and I'm going to create a new one here. So I'm going to type /newbot, and you need to give it a name. And you can call it anything you want, it's like a handle. Uh, I tend to like to call mine by the same as their user ID, so I'm going to make up, uh, x2_tofur_thermiesbot. And now a username, and as I mentioned, I like to use the same thing. So here we are, and right here is our token, so I'm going to click it. And come over here and paste it right here. And now I need the user ID of my Telegram user, so I use IDBot. Um, the first time you come here, it just tells you who you are, and right there is my user ID. And you want the number, not the username. I'm going to paste that right here, and I'm going to click pay and deploy. XCloud charges $28.80 a month for this. And now our server is all set up. Most of what's on the left here is, uh, very normal xCloud hosting stuff, so I'm not going to go over too much of it. Um, monitoring and events can tell you a lot about what's going on on this server, including what Hermes is doing. Under the Hermes menu, there's status providers, channels, and logs. Let's take a look at status here real quick. So it tells you where it's installed and— nope, that's root. It's going to matter later. Here's how you can log into the web app. So we're going to do that real quick. Pull up a new tab and the username is always admin, but the password is different for everybody, of course. And we sign in. Now there's a ton of stuff you can do in here. Uh, you can manage a lot of what what Hermes is doing. You just can't communicate with it. So there's analytics, models, logs, all that stuff. I mentioned earlier that it's easy to change your ChatGPT if you need to. That's where you do it, right here under models, change, and you just pick one. So in my research, when I tried 5.5 and it didn't work I just came in here and switched it to 5.4 and it worked great. Uh, so we're not going to spend too much more time in here. I'm going to go back to Botfather and I created that new bot and you can click right here to open it up. Click start and Hermes doesn't know what start is. So we're going to do commands and here's a whole bunch of stuff. What we're going to do is /new. There we are. And, uh, we need to approve this new chat, so I'm going to approve. Actually, you know, you can do once or always, it doesn't matter. I'm going to do always approve. And there we are. So now we can say hello, and it tells us that it needs, uh, a home channel. So I'm going to do this, but Hermes is there and sees us now. So I'm going to do set home, and there we are. So Hermes is connected. Now you can do /help, see available commands, and these are Hermes commands. There's a lot of them, uh, so you can do anything you need in here, plus 72 more. There are a lot. So that's it, you're connected to Hermes and you can communicate that way. However, you can also do it on the command line, and I'm going to show you how to do that. Um, I'm on there. Well, you know what, before we do that, let's, let's continue this nav right here. There's providers, so you can change that if you need to. Here's another place you can change the model. Then channels, and shows that we are connected with Telegram, and these others are coming soon. Um, and then there's the CLI, which we'll do in a sec. And then of course there are the logs. So let's take a look at using the terminal. Click status again, go to the bottom, and there's this information. Um, we're not going to use that too much right yet, but I'm going to go back to the overview for the server and click SSH access, and I'm going to add a sudo user. Because you're going to need it. So I'm going to create my username and my password, and I'm going to add my SSH key, which I installed previously in the xCloud master panel. If you've not done this, we have an excellent video on how to do it. You should check it out. You have the option to add the sudo user temporarily. It will be automatically deleted after 12 hours. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to leave mine long term. There we are. So to connect, um, I SSH— that's my username, and I'm gonna use that as the host. So there we are, now we're on the server. So, uh, I'm, I'm gonna do this without sudo so you can see what it looks like. You type herm— prefix any Hermes actions with the program name Hermes, but we're going to do Hermes chat. And this is why it fails. So I looked into this. It's because Python 3 is owned by root. So if it's really important to you to run this without sudo and you're decent on the command line, um, there's excellent documentation on how to chown this back to something that you can use. Alternatively, you can simply do sudo hermes-chat And I want to point out that one of the advantages of that is that then Hermes is root and can do things on your server, which can be both dangerous or really powerful depending on what you do with it. So now I'm going to put in my password and there we are. We are in the Hermes agent chat. So we can say, hello, how can I help? So that's how you use the command line with Hermes. Uh, to get out of this, you can either do Ctrl+C or Ctrl+D, and there we are. So that was it. That was setting up Hermes on xCloud. Uh, I didn't have to do anything in the command line that I didn't want to. Um, if you never want to touch the command line, you can do that. You can use Telegram. So I hope you find it useful and powerful.