Quick Start

Plugins

Looking to get started with plugins? For more information, see the Plugins.

To get started with Solace Agent Mesh, you must first create a project.

Prerequisites

You have installed the Solace Agent Mesh CLI. If not, see the Installation page.
You have an available AI provider and API key. For best results, use a state-of-the-art AI model like Anthropic Claude Sonnet 3.7 or OpenAI GPT-4o

Create a Project

Ensure you have the Solace Agent Mesh (SAM) CLI ( run solace-agent-mesh --version or sam ) available. If not, see Installation.

Create a directory for your project and navigate to it.

mkdir my-agent-mesh
cd my-agent-mesh

Run the init command and follow the prompts to create your project. Ensure you enable REST API interface when prompted.

solace-agent-mesh init

Non-Interactive Mode

You can run the init command in a non-interactive mode by passing --skip and all the other configurations as arguments.

To get a list of all the available options, run solace-agent-mesh init --help

Model name format

When passing the model names, you need to use the format provider/name where provider is the provider API interface definition name for example openai if the model is using the standard OpenAI API interface and name is the model name like gpt-4o.

If you're using a non-openai model but hosting it on a custom API that follows the OpenAI standards, like Ollama or LiteLLM, you can still use the openai provider.

For example: openai/llama-3.3-7b

This is the case for all the model names, such as LLMs, image generators, embedding models, etc.

Your project configurations have been written to the solace-agent-mesh.yaml file. To learn more about this file and its configurations, see the configurations page.

Building the Project

The build command generates all the respective solace-ai-connector configuration files. Solace AI Event Connector is the underlying library that runs all the components and connects Solace Agent Mesh to a Solace PubSub+ event broker.

To build the project, run the following command:

solace-agent-mesh build

warning

You must run the solace-agent-mesh commands at the root directory of your project where the solace-agent-mesh.yaml file is located.

Running the Project

To run the project, you can use the run command to execute all the components in a single, multi-threaded application. It's possible to split the components into separate processes. See the deployment page for more information.

solace-agent-mesh run -e

tip

you can use -e flag to load the local .env file when running the project.

tip

You can combine the build and run steps by using solace-agent-mesh run -eb.

To learn more about the other CLI commands, see the CLI documentation.

Interacting with SAM

You can use different gateway interfaces to communicate with the system such REST, Web UI, Slack, MS Teams, etc. To keep it simple for this demo, we will use the browser UI. To connect to the browser UI, open a browser and navigate to http://localhost:5001. If you chose another port during the init step, use that port instead.

This will provide a simple chat interface where you can interact with the Agent Mesh. Try some commands like What is the capital of France? or Give me a diagram of the oAuth process.

Sending a Request via REST API

You can also interact with SAM via a REST API.

The REST API gateway runs on http://localhost:5050 by default. You can send a POST request to the /api/v1/request.

For example, send a request using curl:

curl --location 'http://localhost:5050/api/v1/request' \
--header 'Authorization: Bearer None' \
--form 'prompt="What is the capital of France?"' \
--form 'stream="false"'

warning

It might take a while for the system to respond. See the observability page for more information about monitoring the system while it's processing the request.

Sample output:

{
  "created": 1797746509,
  "id": "restapi-81c30d2c-4943-449a-8d4c-65d0f86ee70a",
  "response": {
    "content": "The capital of France is Paris.",
    "files": []
  },
  "session_id": "c4d46aec-78d6-4a82-9c92-bcf4546f6f84"
}

info

Files would be returned as base64-encoded strings, with the following structure:

"files": [
  {
    "name": "diagram.png",
    "content": "base64 encoded string",
    "mime_type":"image/png"
  }
]

For example, here's a prompt to retrieve a file: prompt="Give me a random bar chart"

Exercise

Try adding a new agent to the system by following the tutorial on adding an SQL database agent. This tutorial will guide you through the process of adding the SQL agent plugin and adding some example data to the database.

Next Steps

Solace Agent Mesh requires two types of components, agents and gateways. The system comes with a set of built-in agents and a REST API gateway (which you enabled during the init step) include a browser UI running on top of it.

You can learn more about gateways. Alternatively, you learn about adding a pre-built gateway interfaces or creating your own new gateways.

Also, you can learn more about agents or about creating your own agents.

note

If you said no to the REST API gateway during the init step, you can add it after using the following command:

solace-agent-mesh add gateway my-rest-endpoint --interface rest-api

Prerequisites​

Create a Project​

Building the Project​

Running the Project​

Interacting with SAM​

Sending a Request via REST API​

Exercise​

Next Steps​