lycus

Ansible automation to provision Ubuntu VMs with Hermes Agent from NousResearch.

What it does

• Creates a dedicated hermes user with passwordless sudo
• Adds your SSH public key to the user's authorized_keys
• Hardens SSH: disables password auth and root login, enforces pubkey-only
• Installs Hermes Agent via the official install script

Prerequisites

• Ansible installed on your local machine
• A target Ubuntu VM reachable over SSH
• An SSH key already authorized on the VM for the bootstrap user (e.g. ubuntu)

Usage

1. Add your VM to the inventory:

# inventory/hosts.yml
all:
  children:
    hermes_servers:
      hosts:
        hermes-vm:
          ansible_host: 192.168.1.100
          ansible_user: ubuntu
      vars:
        ansible_python_interpreter: /usr/bin/python3

2. Run the playbook:

ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts.yml playbooks/hermes.yml

Configuration

Variables are defined in roles/hermes/defaults/main.yml. Override them in your inventory or with -e at runtime.

Variable	Default	Purpose
hermes_user	hermes	User created on the VM
hermes_user_shell	/bin/bash	Login shell
hermes_user_groups	[sudo]	Supplemental groups
hermes_ssh_public_keys	keys from this machine's authorized_keys	Keys added to authorized_keys
hermes_install_script	https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh	Installer URL

Hermes Agent

• Installed via official one-liner; handles Python 3.11, Node.js 22, uv, ripgrep, ffmpeg
• Binary lands at ~/.local/bin/hermes
• Post-install: run hermes model to select an LLM provider, hermes gateway setup for messaging
• Data dir: ~/.hermes/ (override with HERMES_HOME)
• Docs: https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs