Frona is an extremely lightweight application with a small footprint. The hardware you need depends on how you plan to use it. If you only use chat and web search, minimal resources are enough. If you run browser automation with many concurrent sessions, compile code, or deploy multiple apps, you'll need more compute resources.
Hardware
Recommended resources:
| Resource | Minimum | Recommended |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | 2 cores | 4+ cores |
| RAM | 4 GB | 8+ GB |
| Disk | 20 GB | 50+ GB SSD |
| Network | Broadband | Low-latency connection |
Browserless (headless Chrome) is the most resource-intensive component. Each concurrent browser session uses roughly 200-500 MB of RAM. The default configuration allows 10 concurrent sessions.
Software
- A supported container runtime:
- Docker 24 or later with Docker Compose v2, or
- Podman with a Compose provider
- Linux (recommended for production. Landlock sandboxing only works on Linux)
- macOS works for development but CLI sandboxing is limited
Network
The engine needs outbound access to:
- Your LLM provider's API (Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.)
- The internet (for web search and browsing tools)
- Twilio API (if using voice features)
Inbound, you need to expose:
- Port 3001 (Frona serves both the API and frontend on a single port)
- A public URL if using Twilio voice callbacks
LLM provider
Configure at least one model connection. Depending on the provider, this can use an API key, an account sign-in, the server's AWS credentials, or a local Ollama endpoint. Built-in providers include:
Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI (GPT), Groq, OpenRouter, DeepSeek, Google Gemini, Cohere, Mistral, Perplexity, Together AI, xAI (Grok), Hyperbolic, Moonshot, Mira, Galadriel, Hugging Face, Ollama (self-hosted, no API key needed), Azure OpenAI, Amazon Bedrock, GitHub Copilot, and Kimi for Coding. OpenAI connections also support ChatGPT account sign-in.
See Providers & Models for connection setup and Environment Variables for automatic discovery.
Optional services
- Twilio account: required only for voice call features
- ngrok: useful for exposing your local instance to the internet (e.g., for Twilio callbacks during development)