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Conduit ships as a single Docker image with embedded storage — no external database or services required. Mount one volume for persistence and you’re running. This page covers the plain docker run path; for clusters and other hosts see Kubernetes (Helm chart or raw manifests) and Other platforms, and pick a shape on Deployment Tiers.
1

Start the container

CONDUIT_BASE_URL is the externally reachable URL of your instance — it’s used for OAuth callbacks and MCP discovery, so set it to the address your users and AI clients will actually reach.
2

Sign in and finish setup

On first boot, Conduit prints first-run admin credentials to the container logs (docker logs conduit). Open /login, sign in with them, and the setup wizard walks you through creating your admin account.To choose your own bootstrap credentials instead, set CONDUIT_ADMIN_EMAIL and CONDUIT_ADMIN_PASSWORD (nothing is printed then).
3

Back up your encryption key

Conduit encrypts stored secrets (IdP client secrets, SMTP credentials, connector tokens) with a key auto-generated at /data/conduit.key on first boot. Back this file up — without it, stored secrets are unrecoverable. To manage the key yourself and keep it out of data-volume backups, set CONDUIT_ENCRYPTION_KEY instead.

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Choosing an image tag

  • vX.Y.Z — a specific release. Pin this in production and upgrade deliberately.
  • stable — the newest release. Convenient for evaluation.
  • Avoid latest — it tracks unreleased development, not the newest release.
If your environment can’t pull from ghcr.io, mirror the image into your own registry (see private registries) or build it from source.

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Upgrading

Pull the new tag and recreate the container; the data volume carries everything over. Database migrations run automatically on boot. Before upgrading, read the changelog for the releases you’re jumping across — the Upgrade notes section of each release lists anything that needs operator action.

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TLS

The default deployment runs plain HTTP behind a TLS-terminating reverse proxy, with CONDUIT_BASE_URL set to the https:// address. To have Conduit terminate TLS natively instead, set CONDUIT_TLS_CERT_FILE and CONDUIT_TLS_KEY_FILE. AI clients require HTTPS for OAuth, so one or the other is effectively mandatory for real use.

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What the fronting proxy is responsible for

Conduit defends itself against the abuse it can see per request: every request body is size-capped, headers and request reads are on timeouts (ReadHeaderTimeout, ReadTimeout, IdleTimeout), and expensive pre-auth work sits behind per-IP rate limits. It does not bound response writes. WriteTimeout is deliberately unset, because a response deadline would sever the long-lived /mcp SSE streams that AI clients hold open for the duration of a session. A client that requests responses and then drains them a byte at a time therefore holds connection state for as long as it likes. Volumetric abuse — connection floods, slow-read clients, request rates far above what per-IP limits are meant for — is the fronting proxy’s job. If you expose Conduit’s port directly to untrusted networks, you are giving up that layer. Behind a proxy, also set CONDUIT_TRUSTED_PROXIES so per-IP rate limiting sees real client addresses instead of the proxy’s. See the configuration reference for every setting.