What is Gooey Server?
What Gooey Server is, how the pieces fit together, and why you might want to run it on your own infrastructure.
Gooey.AI is a low-code AI recipe platform, and Gooey Server is our core repo — the same code that runs gooey.ai itself. It lets you discover, customize, and deploy AI "recipes" using the best of private and open-source AI, all behind a single API with a single auth token.
Recipes are workflows that chain models together to accomplish a task. They are designed to be highly customizable and shareable, and everything you can do on the hosted service you can also do on a server you run yourself.
The source lives at github.com/GooeyAI/gooey-server under the Apache-2.0 licence.
Architecture
Gooey Server is four application processes running on top of four backing services.
The components
gooey-gui (gooey-gui/)
Remix/React frontend. Asks the Python server to render each page as a JSON component tree, renders that in React, and subscribes to Redis pub/sub so pages update live while a recipe runs.
3000
Python API + GUI Server (server.py)
FastAPI app that serves the public API and the page-render endpoints used by gooey-gui.
8080
Celery Workers (celeryapp/)
Run the actual recipes: consume jobs from RabbitMQ, call the GenAI providers, save results to Postgres, and publish progress to Redis.
—
Django Admin (gooeysite/)
Admin UI over the same Postgres database — where you manage users, credits, and AI model specs.
8000
PostgreSQL 15
Application database.
5432
Redis 8
Cache and realtime pub/sub.
6379
RabbitMQ
Celery broker.
5672
Vespa
Vector and full-text search, powering document search / RAG.
8085
Why local and sovereign hosting matters
Running Gooey on your own infrastructure isn't only a developer convenience — for a lot of our users it's the whole point.
AI systems increasingly mediate healthcare advice, agricultural extension, education, and government services. When that infrastructure runs in someone else's data centre under someone else's terms, the communities being served have no say over how it behaves, what it costs, whether it understands their language, or whether it stays switched on.
Self-hosted Gooey Server is a practical answer to that:
Data stays where you put it. Uploads, run history, and user records live in your Postgres and your filesystem. Nothing has to leave your network.
Models are your choice. Point Gooey at a model running on your own GPU — Ollama, vLLM, LocalAI, llama.cpp — or at a regional provider, or at a frontier lab. Switching is a config change, not a rewrite.
No vendor can suspend you. Every proprietary dependency is optional and off by default. The stack runs end to end on open-source components.
Workflows are portable. Recipes built on a sovereign deployment can be shared with, and forked by, anyone else running the same open stack.
Our founders wrote about this at length in How Middle Powers Cooperate for AI Sovereignty — the case that middle-power nations gain more from cooperating on open benchmarks, datasets, commoditised models, and shared workflows than from each building an isolated stack. Self-hosted Gooey Server is the piece of that argument you can actually run.
Running with zero proprietary services
A default local install already avoids every closed-source dependency. Nothing in this table needs configuring to reach the "Default locally" column — that is what you get out of the box.
Auth
Local Django email/password (routers/local_auth.py)
ENABLE_FIREBASE_AUTH
File storage
Local filesystem under MEDIA_ROOT (./media)
GS_BUCKET_NAME
LLMs
Any OpenAI-compatible server via AIModelSpec.base_url
Provider API keys
STT / TTS / embeddings
Self-hosted Whisper, Seamless, MMS, Bark, E5/GTE on the GPU Celery worker
Provider API keys
Document OCR
Standard text extraction, no OCR
AZURE_FORM_RECOGNIZER_KEY or MISTRAL_API_KEY
Payments
Disabled; billing UI degrades gracefully and credits are granted via the admin
STRIPE_SECRET_KEY
Image moderation
Skipped
AZURE_IMAGE_MODERATION_ENDPOINT
Managed secrets
Disabled; pass keys to functions as env vars
AZURE_KEY_VAULT_ENDPOINT
Analytics
No script served
GTM ID
Messaging connectors
Disabled
FB_APP_ID, TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID, SLACK_CLIENT_ID
The backing services are PostgreSQL (PostgreSQL License), RabbitMQ (MPL-2.0), Vespa (Apache-2.0), and Redis 8 (used under its AGPL-3.0 option; Valkey is a drop-in alternative with no code changes). Gooey Server itself is Apache-2.0.
Full detail, including code references for each swap point, is in Platform Independence.
Where to go next
Still stuck? Ask in Discord.
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