Deploy with Docker

Dockerfile (minimal)

FROM oven/bun:1
RUN bun install -g @cuongtran001/kanna

# Kanna's data directory is always $HOME/.kanna — it is not configurable by a
# flag or an env var, so the volume has to be mounted where HOME points.
ENV HOME=/data
WORKDIR /data
VOLUME ["/data"]

EXPOSE 3210
CMD ["kanna", "--remote", "--no-open"]

KANNA_HOME does not exist

Older guides — including earlier versions of this page — told you to set ENV KANNA_HOME=/data. Kanna never read that variable, so the container wrote its chats to the image’s own $HOME and lost every one of them on restart. Set HOME instead, as above.

Build + run

docker build -t kanna .
docker run -d \
  --name kanna \
  -p 3210:3210 \
  -v kanna-data:/data \
  kanna --remote --no-open --password changeme

The password is a CLI flag, not an -e variable. Anything after the image name is appended to CMD.

Check the volume is actually being used

Worth doing once, because the failure mode is silent — the app works fine until the container is replaced:

docker exec kanna ls /data/.kanna/data

You should see settings.json and the chat directories. An empty or missing path means HOME is not pointing at the mount.

The agent runs inside the container

Kanna spawns the claude / codex CLIs as subprocesses, and they inherit the container’s filesystem and HOME. So a containerised install needs those CLIs present in the image, and the repositories you want to work on mounted in. It is the same trade-off as any dev-container setup — the agent can only see what the container can see.