Open AEA Framework

A framework for autonomous economic agent (AEA) development with no vendor lock-in

This is a fork of the original AEA project with the benefit that all vendor lock-in at the package level is removed. This means, there are no dependencies on centrally hosted registries for agent packages and the AEA itself does not prefer any package vendor over another. Where feasible, compatibility with the original AEA framework is maintained.

Get started developing AEAs

1. Create and launch a clean virtual environment with Python 3.10 (any Python >= 3.8 works):

   pipenv --python 3.10 && pipenv shell
   

2. Install the package from PyPI:

   pip install open-aea[all]
   

   Or, if you use zsh rather than bash:

   pip install "open-aea[all]"
   

3. Then, build your agent as described in the docs.

Alternatively (1): Use pipx (CLI usage only)

1. Install pipx

2. Install the package from PyPI:

   pipx install open-aea[all]
   

3. Run AEA CLI e.g.:

   aea --help
   

Alternatively (2): Install from Source

This approach is not recommended!

Cloning

This repository contains submodules. Clone with recursive strategy:

git clone https://github.com/valory-xyz/open-aea.git --recursive && cd open-aea

• To fetch/update submodules (for existing local repo):

  git submodule sync --recursive && git submodule update --init --recursive
  

Dependencies

All python specific framework dependencies are specified in setup.py and installed with the framework. All development dependencies are specified in Pipfile (and installed via the commands specified in Preliminaries).

You can have more control on the installed dependencies by leveraging the setuptools' extras mechanism.

Preliminaries

• Create and launch a virtual environment with Python 3.10 (any Python >= 3.8 works):

  pipenv --python 3.10 && pipenv shell
  

• Install the package from source:

  pip install .[all]
  

  Or, if you use zsh rather than bash:

  pip install ".[all]"
  

• Then, build your agent as described in the docs.

• Install Skaffold to manage containers & tagging:

curl -Lo skaffold https://storage.googleapis.com/skaffold/releases/v1.39.0/skaffold-linux-amd64 && \
sudo install skaffold /usr/local/bin/

Documentation

• All documentation is hosted here.

• To start a live-reloading docs server on localhost: mkdocs serve. To amend the docs, create a new documentation file in docs/ and add a reference to it in mkdocs.yml.

• To run demos against local packages use flag --local in aea CLI commands.

Contributing

We welcome contributions to the framework, its plugins, related tools and packages. Please consult the contributing guide for details.

Cite

If you are using our software in a publication, please consider to cite it with the following BibTex entry:

@misc{agents-aea,
  Author = {Marco Favorito and David Minarsch and Ali Hosseini and Aristotelis Triantafyllidis and Diarmid Campbell and Oleg Panasevych and Kevin Chen and Yuri Turchenkov and Lokman Rahmani and Jiří Vestfál and James Riehl and 8baller and Adamantios Zaras and David Vilela and Michiel Karrenbelt and Viraj Patel},
  Title = {Open Autonomous Economic Agent (AEA) Framework},
  Year = {2021},
}