Quick Start with NVIDIA NeMo Agent Toolkit#

This guide will walk you through running and evaluating existing workflows. If you have not yet installed the NeMo Agent toolkit, follow the instructions in the Install Guide first.

Obtaining API Keys#

Depending on which workflows you are running, you may need to obtain API keys from the respective services. Most NeMo Agent toolkit workflows require an NVIDIA API key defined with the NVIDIA_API_KEY environment variable. An API key can be obtained by creating an account on build.nvidia.com.

Optional OpenAI API Key#

Some workflows may also require an OpenAI API key. Create an account on OpenAI. Navigate to your account settings to obtain your OpenAI API key. Copy the key and set it as an environment variable using the following command:

export OPENAI_API_KEY="<YOUR_OPENAI_API_KEY>"

Running Example Workflows#

Before running any of the NeMo Agent toolkit examples, set your NVIDIA API key as an environment variable to access NVIDIA AI services.

export NVIDIA_API_KEY=<YOUR_API_KEY>

Note

Replace <YOUR_API_KEY> with your actual NVIDIA API key.

Running the Simple Workflow#

  1. Install the nat_simple_web_query Workflow

    uv pip install -e examples/getting_started/simple_web_query

  2. Run the nat_simple_web_query Workflow

    nat run --config_file=examples/getting_started/simple_web_query/configs/config.yml --input "What is LangSmith"

  3. Run and evaluate the nat_simple_web_query Workflow

    The eval_config.yml YAML is a super-set of the config.yml containing additional fields for evaluation. To evaluate the nat_simple_web_query workflow, run the following command:

    nat eval --config_file=examples/evaluation_and_profiling/simple_web_query_eval/configs/eval_config.yml

NeMo Agent Toolkit Packages#

Once a NeMo Agent toolkit workflow is ready for deployment to production, the deployed workflow will need to declare a dependency on the nvidia-nat package, along with the needed plugins. When declaring a dependency on NeMo Agent toolkit, we recommend using the first two digits of the version number. For example if the version is 1.0.0, then the dependency would be 1.0.

For more information on the available plugins, refer to Framework Integrations.

Example of a dependency for NeMo Agent toolkit using the LangChain/LangGraph plugin for projects using a pyproject.toml file:

dependencies = [
"nvidia-nat[langchain]~=1.0",
# Add any additional dependencies your workflow needs
]

For projects using a requirements.txt file:

nvidia-nat[langchain]==1.0.*

Next Steps#

  • Review the NeMo Agent toolkit tutorials for detailed guidance on using the toolkit.

  • Explore the examples in the examples directory to learn how to build custom workflows and tools with NeMo Agent toolkit.