Build Your First AI Team with Markus in 5 Minutes

Build Your First AI Team with Markus in 5 Minutes Deploy a full AI workforce on your own machine — zero config, one command, and you're live. Imagine having a team of AI agents that review your pull requests, scan your dependencies for vulnerabilities, generate daily news briefs, write documentation, and manage your social media content — all running locally on your laptop. No cloud dependency. No complex setup. No credit card required to start. Welcome to Markus — the open-source platform that lets you deploy an AI team in under 5 minutes. In this step-by-step tutorial, you'll learn: ✅ Three ways to install Markus (curl one-liner, npm, Docker) ✅ How to access the Web UI at http://localhost:8056 ✅ How to configure LLM providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, DeepSeek, MiniMax, SiliconFlow, OpenRouter, Z.AI, Ollama) ✅ The 5 quick-win scenarios you can set up in 30 minutes ✅ Essential CLI commands to manage your AI workforce Let's get started. What Is Markus? Markus is a self-hosted AI digital employee platform that lets you create, manage, and coordinate a team of AI agents — right from your terminal or browser. Here's the architecture at a glance: ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ Web UI (React + Vite + Tailwind) │ │ Dashboard · Chat · Project · Builder · Settings │ └──────────────────────┬───────────────────────────┘ │ REST + WebSocket ┌──────────────────────┴───────────────────────────┐ │ Org Manager (API Server) │ │ Auth · Governance · Projects · Reports │ └──────────────────────┬───────────────────────────┘ │ ┌──────────────────────┴───────────────────────────┐ │ Agent Runtime (Core Engine) │ │ Agent · LLM Router · Tools · Memory · Heartbeat │ └──────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ The key ideas: Agent Roles — Each agent is either a Worker (executes tasks) or a Manager (coordinates the team) spawn_subagent — Agents can spawn lightweight sub-agents to parallelize work (e.g., research 10 topics simultaneously) Heartbeat — Agents work proactively on schedules, not just when you ask LLM Router — Automatic failover across Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, DeepSeek, MiniMax, SiliconFlow, OpenRouter, Z.AI, and local Ollama models Tulving Memory — Three-layer memory system (procedural, semantic, episodic) inspired by cognitive psychology Now let's get it running. Deploy Your AI Team in 5 Minutes — Three Ways Markus supports three installation methods. Choose the one that fits your workflow. 🚀 One-Click Install (curl) — Recommended for Everyone This is the fastest way to get started. Open your terminal and run: curl -fsSL https://markus.global/install.sh | bash The script automatically: Detects your OS and architecture Checks Node.js version (requires ≥ 22.0.0) Installs the @markus-global/cli npm package globally (or downloads standalone binary) Creates the default config directory at ~/.markus/ Runs the setup wizard and prints next steps Once installation completes, start Markus: markus start That's i…