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Self-hosted Skyvern runs entirely on your infrastructure: your servers, your browsers, your LLM API keys. This guide helps you decide if self-hosting fits your needs and which deployment method to choose.

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Architecture

Self-hosted Skyvern has four components running on your infrastructure:

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How a task executes

Skyvern runs a perception-action loop for each task step:
  1. Screenshot: The browser captures the current page state
  2. Analyze: The screenshot is sent to your LLM, which identifies interactive elements and decides the next action
  3. Execute: Skyvern performs the action in the browser (click, type, scroll, extract data)
  4. Repeat: Steps 1-3 loop until the task goal is met or the step limit (MAX_STEPS_PER_RUN) is reached
This loop is why LLM choice and browser configuration are the two most impactful self-hosting decisions. They affect every task step.

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What changes from Cloud

The most significant operational difference is proxies. Skyvern Cloud routes browser traffic through managed residential proxies to avoid bot detection. Self-hosted deployments need you to configure your own proxy provider.

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Prerequisites

Before deploying, ensure you have:
1

Docker and Docker Compose

Required for containerized deployment. Install Docker
2

4GB+ RAM

Browser instances are memory-intensive. Production deployments benefit from 8GB+.
3

LLM API key

From OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure OpenAI, Google Gemini, or AWS Bedrock. Alternatively, run local models with Ollama.
4

Proxy provider (recommended)

For automating external websites at scale. Not required for internal tools or development.
PostgreSQL 14+ is included in the Docker Compose setup. If you prefer an external database, configure DATABASE_STRING to point to your own instance. For local server commands from PyPI, install the server extra: pip install "skyvern[server]". The lightweight pip install skyvern package is for Skyvern Cloud / remote API SDK usage and does not include the local server stack. Guided quickstart and migrations currently require Docker Compose or a source checkout. For a full self-hosted deployment with the web UI, use Docker Compose. The Compose stack starts the API server, browser runtime, Postgres, and the Skyvern web UI together. For the source-checkout pip install ".[server]" path (Option A in the README), the default is a SQLite database at ~/.skyvern/data.db — zero-config for local dev. To opt into Postgres for that path, run skyvern quickstart --database-string=postgresql+psycopg://user:pass@host:5432/dbname.

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Choose your deployment method

Most teams start with Docker Compose. It’s the fastest path to a working deployment. Move to Kubernetes when you need horizontal scaling or want to integrate with existing orchestration infrastructure.

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Next steps

Docker Setup

Get Skyvern running in 10 minutes with Docker Compose

Kubernetes Deployment

Deploy to production with Kubernetes manifests