agentreg — A self hosted registry for AI agents to…

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About this project

Agentreg is a self-hosted registry that facilitates AI agents in discovering one another by their capabilities. It offers health checks and trust assessments, enabling seamless integration and communication between multiple agents. Simple to set up with a single Go binary, it scales from local to large deployments without the need for cloud services.

agentreg: A Self-Hosted DNS for AI Agents

agentreg serves as a crucial infrastructure layer for AI agents, offering a self-hosted registry that facilitates agent discovery based on capabilities, while incorporating health and trust features. The application is designed as a single binary executable, requiring no cloud, accounts, or complex configurations, making it suitable for both individual developers and organizations.

Key Features

Capability-Based Discovery: Unlike traditional service discovery methods, agentreg allows agents to locate each other based on their capabilities, enabling flexible integration without hard-coded endpoints.
Integrated Health Checks: Each registered agent undergoes regular health monitoring. This proactive approach ensures that any failures are identified promptly, allowing for efficient troubleshooting before any downstream issues arise.
Self-Hosting: Complete control over the registry is maintained, as agentreg operates entirely on local hardware. No data is sent to the cloud, aligning with privacy and security best practices.
Scalability: Designed to perform efficiently even with a small number of agents, agentreg scales seamlessly to support larger deployments as needs grow, from a few agents to numerous instances.
Trust Framework: Although currently in development, future iterations are set to include a verification layer enabling trust assessments of agents, thus enhancing security and reliability within the system.

Getting Started

The following commands provide a simple introduction to using agentreg:

# Start the agent registry
gentctl serve &

# Register agents with specific capabilities
agentctl register search-agent -c search -e http://localhost:3000
agentctl register db-agent -c db-read -e http://localhost:3001
agentctl register product-api -c api,email -e http://localhost:3002

# List all registered agents with their health status
agentctl list

# Discover agents based on capabilities
gentctl find search

Example output from agentctl list:

NAME          CAPABILITIES  STATUS     SOURCE  LAST HEARTBEAT  ENDPOINT
db-agent      db-read       unhealthy  local   just now        http://localhost:3001
product-api   api,email     healthy    local   just now        http://localhost:3002
search-agent  search        healthy    local   just now        http://localhost:3000

Why Choose agentreg?

agentreg addresses common challenges faced by developers when managing multiple AI agents. By providing a unified platform for agent discovery and health monitoring, it reduces the overhead associated with manual configurations and endpoint management.

Comparison to Alternatives

Feature	agentreg	MCP Registry	Consul	ANS (IETF)
Self-hosted, no cloud dependency	✅	❌ (cloud)	✅	~ (ref impl)
Capability-based discovery	✅	✅	~	✅
Health checks built in	✅	❌	✅	❌
Single binary, 30-second setup	✅	n/a	❌	❌
Cross-org trust / verification	🔜 (pluggable)	❌	❌	✅
Purpose-built for agents/MCP	✅	✅	❌	✅

Roadmap

The future of agentreg includes enhancements such as:

Development of pluggable verification methods to build a trust framework.
Expansion into registry federation capabilities for multi-system integrations.
Additional utilities such as command-line interfaces for live listing and diagnosis.

By integrating these features, agentreg aims to become a foundational tool for developers working with AI agents.