Docker Compose

Remem’s Community Edition core is a single Rust service, remem-server: the REST API, embedded storage engine, embedding service, and MCP server (Streamable HTTP at /mcp), all in one container. Docker Compose is the supported way to run it.

Services

• remem-server — REST API (Axum), embedded storage engine, embedding service, MCP (Streamable HTTP at /mcp). Listens on 4545.

Prerequisites

• Docker and Docker Compose
• 2GB+ RAM free

Pull the image

docker pull rememorg/remem-community:server-latest

docker-compose.yml

This is the whole stack — no config file required to get started:

services:
  remem-server:
    image: rememorg/remem-community:server-latest
    container_name: remem-server
    ports:
      - "4545:4545"
    volumes:
      - ./data/remem:/var/lib/remem
    environment:
      - RUST_LOG=info
      - REMEM_ALLOW_AUTH_DISABLED=true   # dev only — see "Enabling authentication" below
    networks:
      - remem-network
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "curl", "-f", "http://localhost:4545/api/v1/ready"]
      interval: 30s
      timeout: 10s
      retries: 3
      start_period: 60s
    restart: unless-stopped

networks:
  remem-network:
    driver: bridge
    name: remem-network

No config.toml is mounted here — remem-server runs on built-in defaults (port 4545, 384-dim embeddings, standard HNSW/task settings). If you want to tune any of that (storage paths, HNSW parameters, auto-discovery threshold, task schedules), see Configuration for the full file and mount it at /etc/remem/config.toml:ro — remem-server picks it up automatically when present.

The start_period: 60s on remem-server’s healthcheck exists because the embedding model loads on first boot; give it a minute before expecting healthy.

Starting

docker compose up -d
docker compose ps

Verifying

curl http://localhost:4545/api/v1/health

# MCP server (Streamable HTTP, in-process)
curl -sf -X POST http://localhost:4545/mcp \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"initialize","params":{}}'

Both work with no Authorization header because REMEM_ALLOW_AUTH_DISABLED=true is set above — every other endpoint (/api/v1/memories, /mcp, etc.) is unauthenticated in this dev configuration. See “Enabling authentication” below before exposing this beyond your local machine.

Enabling authentication

Auth is fail-closed: leaving both REMEM_API_KEY unset and REMEM_ALLOW_AUTH_DISABLED unset makes remem-server return HTTP 500 on every non-health request rather than silently allowing access. To turn on real auth, set a key and drop the disable flag:

environment:
  - REMEM_API_KEY=${REMEM_API_KEY}
  # REMEM_ALLOW_AUTH_DISABLED removed

REMEM_API_KEY=$(openssl rand -hex 32) docker compose up -d

Then every request (except /api/v1/health, /api/v1/ready, /api/v1/openapi.json) needs the key:

curl http://localhost:4545/api/v1/memories \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $REMEM_API_KEY"
# or: -H "X-API-Key: $REMEM_API_KEY"

Accessing

• REST API: http://localhost:4545
• MCP (Streamable HTTP): http://localhost:4545/mcp — or run the remem-mcp binary as a stdio bridge, see Connecting an LLM client via MCP

Updating

docker compose pull
docker compose up -d

Remem uses WAL-backed storage — updates are safe without stopping writes first.

Observability (Business — Coming soon)

Prometheus metrics scraping and pre-built Grafana dashboards are not part of the Community Edition Compose stack. They ship as part of the Business Edition’s observability tooling and are not available today.