Getting Started#

Development Environment#

For a consistent development environment, use the provided devcontainer configuration. This requires:

To use the devcontainer:

  1. Open the project in VS Code.

  2. Click the button in the bottom-left corner.

  3. Select Reopen in Container.

This builds and starts a container with all the necessary dependencies for Dynamo development.

Installation#

Note

  • The following examples require system level packages.

  • We recommend Ubuntu 24.04 with a x86_64 CPU. See the Support Matrix.

apt-get update
DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -yq python3-dev python3-pip python3-venv libucx0
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

pip install ai-dynamo[all]

Note

To ensure compatibility, use the examples in the release branch or tag that matches the version you installed.

Building the Dynamo Base Image#

Although not needed for local development, deploying your Dynamo pipelines to Kubernetes requires you to build and push a Dynamo base image to your container registry. You can use any container registry of your choice, such as:

  • Docker Hub (docker.io)

  • NVIDIA NGC Container Registry (nvcr.io)

  • Any private registry

To build it:

./container/build.sh
docker tag dynamo:latest-vllm <your-registry>/dynamo-base:latest-vllm
docker login <your-registry>
docker push <your-registry>/dynamo-base:latest-vllm

This documentation describes these frameworks:

  • --framework vllm build: see here.

  • --framework tensorrtllm build: see here.

After building, use this image by setting the DYNAMO_IMAGE environment variable to point to your built image:

export DYNAMO_IMAGE=<your-registry>/dynamo-base:latest-vllm

Running and Interacting with an LLM Locally#

To run a model and interact with it locally, call dynamo run with a hugging face model. dynamo run supports several backends including: mistralrs, sglang, vllm, and tensorrtllm.

Example Command#

dynamo run out=vllm deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B

? User › Hello, how are you?
✔ User · Hello, how are you?
Okay, so I'm trying to figure out how to respond to the user's greeting.
They said, "Hello, how are you?" and then followed it with "Hello! I'm just a program, but thanks for asking."
Hmm, I need to come up with a suitable reply. ...

LLM Serving#

Dynamo provides a simple way to spin up a local set of inference components including:

  • OpenAI Compatible Frontend–High performance OpenAI compatible http api server written in Rust.

  • Basic and Kv Aware Router–Route and load balance traffic to a set of workers.

  • Workers–Set of pre-configured LLM serving engines.

To run a minimal configuration you can use a pre-configured example.

Start Dynamo Distributed Runtime Services#

To start the Dynamo Distributed Runtime services the first time:

docker compose -f deploy/docker-compose.yml up -d

Start Dynamo LLM Serving Components#

Next, serve a minimal configuration with an http server, basic round-robin router, and a single worker.

cd examples/llm
dynamo serve graphs.agg:Frontend -f configs/agg.yaml

Send a Request#

curl localhost:8000/v1/chat/completions   -H "Content-Type: application/json"   -d '{
    "model": "deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B",
    "messages": [
    {
        "role": "user",
        "content": "Hello, how are you?"
    }
    ],
    "stream":false,
    "max_tokens": 300
  }' | jq

Local Development#

If you use vscode or cursor, use the .devcontainer folder built on Microsofts Extension. For instructions, see the ReadMe.

Otherwise, to develop locally, we recommend working inside of the container:

./container/build.sh
./container/run.sh -it --mount-workspace

cargo build --release
mkdir -p /workspace/deploy/dynamo/sdk/src/dynamo/sdk/cli/bin
cp /workspace/target/release/http /workspace/deploy/dynamo/sdk/src/dynamo/sdk/cli/bin
cp /workspace/target/release/llmctl /workspace/deploy/dynamo/sdk/src/dynamo/sdk/cli/bin
cp /workspace/target/release/dynamo-run /workspace/deploy/dynamo/sdk/src/dynamo/sdk/cli/bin

uv pip install -e .
export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/workspace/deploy/dynamo/sdk/src:/workspace/components/planner/src

Conda Environment#

Alternately, you can use a Conda environment:

conda activate <ENV_NAME>

pip install nixl # Or install https://github.com/ai-dynamo/nixl from source

cargo build --release

# To install ai-dynamo-runtime from source
cd lib/bindings/python
pip install .

cd ../../../
pip install .[all]

# To test
docker compose -f deploy/docker-compose.yml up -d
cd examples/llm
dynamo serve graphs.agg:Frontend -f configs/agg.yaml
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