Setting up Bee-Stack on MacOS Intel

2 min readFeb 5, 2025

Introduction

This article describes the troubleshooting steps to set-up a the Bee-Stack on a MacOS Intel laptop!

Set the foundations first: what is the Bee framework and Bee-Stack

The Bee Agent Platform empowers developers to create, customize, and deploy AI agents. Our ecosystem provides everything you need to build production-ready AI agents — from low-level primitives to no-code interfaces.

The Bee Stack repository provides everything you need to run the Bee Application Stack locally using Docker Compose. This setup allows you to run, test, and experiment with Bee’s various components seamlessly.

What is needed to run the Bee Stack locally

The ideal software required is Rancher Desktop and Docker compose. You should ideally also have some CPU and RAM capacities.

Download and install the Rancher Desktop.
Install Docker compose. I made a bash file to do everything in one step.

#!/bin/bash

sudo curl -L "https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/latest/download/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

sudo -i

chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

docker compose version

Launch Rancher Desktop and configure the necessary requirements from the ‘Preferences’ menu as the example shown below.

Set-up the Bee Stack locally.

git clone https://github.com/i-am-bee/bee-stack.git
cd bee-stack
# Run setup script to configure LLM provider and start the stack
./bee-stack.sh setup

Start the Bee Stack.

./bee-stack.sh start # start the stack (this can take a while)
./bee-stack.sh stop  # stop the stack without removing data
./bee-stack.sh clean # remove data
./bee-stack.sh setup # reconfigure (e.g. to switch LLM provider)

The Bee Stack URLs.

bee-ui: http://localhost:3000
mlflow: http://localhost:8080
bee-api: http://localhost:4000 (for direct use of the api, use apiKey sk-testkey)

Conclusion

I wanted to share my experience on setting-up the Bee Stack locally.

Stay tuned for the upcoming agents built with the Bee framework… ✌️

Useful links

The BeeAI: https://github.com/i-am-bee
Bee Stack: https://github.com/i-am-bee/bee-stack
Bee Stack troubleshooting: https://github.com/i-am-bee/bee-stack/blob/main/docs/troubleshooting.md