Installing the box

One command, four questions, a banner. About 25 minutes on a blank Ubuntu machine, most of it download.

Before you start


Machine	Ubuntu 24.04 or macOS. On Windows, run this inside WSL2 Ubuntu — the installer stops if you try it anywhere else. WSL2 puts the box behind a NAT the same way a virtual machine does, so other devices on the office network cannot reach it without a `netsh interface portproxy` forward; the from-home mesh works regardless. For a box the whole office reaches on the LAN, prefer a machine running Ubuntu or macOS directly.
Network	For a box that stays in one place, give it a fixed address (a DHCP reservation on the router, or a static IP). The box bakes its address into its certificate at install; if a plain DHCP lease later hands it a different one, `<name>.local` stops matching until you re-run `nufi-box announce`.
Docker	Engine plus Compose v2. On Ubuntu the installer offers to install Docker for you; on macOS install Docker Desktop or OrbStack first.
git	Any recent one (2.25 or newer; Ubuntu 24.04 ships 2.43). On macOS the first `git` command offers to install the Command Line Tools if they are missing; on Ubuntu, `sudo apt-get install -y git` if `git --version` says nothing.
Memory	On macOS, give the Docker VM at least 12 GB (Settings → Resources → Memory). The installer warns below 11 GB and carries on. The box itself uses about 3 GB running.
Disk	Budget 30 GB. Most of it is the model and the images.

A GPU is optional. Without one the box answers from the CPU, which works and is slower; a machine serving a handful of people at once wants a GPU.

The box is three folders of one repository: deploy/box, and beside it deploy/platform/scenarios — nufi-box flows install runs the routine builder studio/build_flows.py, which imports run_box and run from the folder above it — and deploy/platform/adapters/nufi-cron, which nufi-box schedule list needs. Together they are about 1 MB. A sparse clone fetches just those:

git clone --depth 1 --filter=blob:none --sparse https://github.com/dudaji-vn/nufi-app
cd nufi-app
git sparse-checkout set deploy/box deploy/platform/scenarios/studio deploy/platform/adapters/nufi-cron
cd deploy/box

This takes a few seconds on any link. Naming scenarios/studio in the set also brings the files at the root of scenarios/ (a sparse checkout always includes a folder's parents) and leaves out scenarios/demo, twenty megabytes of videos the box never reads.

Do not download the repository as one archive instead (curl … codeload.github.com … | tar -xz): it is about 200 MB, of which the box uses 1 MB, and on an office link that is ten to twenty minutes with nothing printed — curl -s is silent while it waits, so it looks stuck.

Install

./install-box.sh --yes

--yes takes every default. Drop it to be asked instead:

Question	Default	What it decides
Box name	`nufi`	Yours to choose. Becomes the office address (`<name>.local`), the from-home address (`<name>.box.<domain>`) and the name on the certificate. Lowercase letters, digits and hyphens. Two boxes on one network or one coordinator must not share a name — see On the LAN and from home
Admin email	`admin@nufi.local`	The one login you use across all four products
Departments	`legal,hr,ga,strategy`	One drive folder, one team and one agent per name
Inference profile	`ollama` (macOS) or `ollama-docker` (Linux)	Where the model runs

Inference profiles

Profile	Where the model runs
`ollama`	Ollama already on the host (macOS default)
`ollama-docker`	Ollama in a container the box manages (Linux default)
`remote`	Another machine on your network speaking the OpenAI API
`cloud`	A hosted provider. The only profile where text leaves the building.

ollama and ollama-docker ask which model; the default is qwen2.5:7b. remote and cloud ask for a base URL and a key.

How long it takes

Measured, not estimated:


Blank Ubuntu 24.04, 4 vCPU, 8 GB, no Docker, nothing cached	25 min 40 s from the first command to the banner
A machine that already has the images and the model	about 75 seconds

Nearly all of the difference is download. Docker Engine goes on, the installer re-runs itself inside the new docker group, and the first image starts coming down within two minutes.

  NuFi box "nufi" is up.

  Chat:        https://nufi.local:3080     (also https://<box-ip>:3080)
  Agents:      https://nufi.local:3001/choose
  Console:     https://nufi.local:3001
  Admin panel: https://nufi.local:3002
  Certificate: http://nufi.local/   ← laptops trust it once

  Admin login: admin@nufi.local / <generated password>
  Drives:      <data dir>/drives/<department>  → become that department's knowledge

  Day two:     nufi-box status | logs | drive add <name> | ca-cert | doctor

Four URLs, one login, and where the folders live. Write the admin password down now — it is generated during the install and it is in .env, which is created mode 0600 and holds every other secret the box has.

If something goes wrong

./nufi-box doctor

It checks the things that actually break and says what to do about each in plain words. Re-running ./install-box.sh is safe: it keeps the answers already on disk unless you override them explicitly.

Before you start

Get the box

Install

Inference profiles

How long it takes

The banner is the result

If something goes wrong

On this page