OpenHands Software Agent SDK

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The OpenHands Software Agent SDK is a set of Python and REST APIs for building agents that work with code.

You can use the OpenHands Software Agent SDK for:

• One-off tasks, like building a README for your repo
• Routine maintenance tasks, like updating dependencies
• Major tasks that involve multiple agents, like refactors and rewrites

Importantly, agents can either use the local machine as their workspace, or run inside ephemeral workspaces (e.g. in Docker or Kubernetes) using the Agent Server.

You can even use the SDK to build new developer experiences: it’s the engine behind the OpenHands CLI and OpenHands Cloud.

Get started with some examples or check out the docs to learn more.

Here's what building with the SDK looks like:

import os

from openhands.sdk import LLM, Agent, Conversation, Tool
from openhands.tools.file_editor import FileEditorTool
from openhands.tools.task_tracker import TaskTrackerTool
from openhands.tools.terminal import TerminalTool


llm = LLM(
    model="anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929",
    api_key=os.getenv("LLM_API_KEY"),
)

agent = Agent(
    llm=llm,
    tools=[
        Tool(name=TerminalTool.name),
        Tool(name=FileEditorTool.name),
        Tool(name=TaskTrackerTool.name),
    ],
)

cwd = os.getcwd()
conversation = Conversation(agent=agent, workspace=cwd)

conversation.send_message("Write 3 facts about the current project into FACTS.txt.")
conversation.run()
print("All done!")

For installation instructions and detailed setup, see the Getting Started Guide.

For detailed documentation, tutorials, and API reference, visit:

https://docs.openhands.dev/sdk

The documentation includes:

• Getting Started Guide - Installation and setup
• Architecture & Core Concepts - Agents, tools, workspaces, and more
• Guides - Hello World, custom tools, MCP, skills, and more
• API Reference - Agent Server REST API documentation

The examples/ directory contains comprehensive usage examples:

• Standalone SDK (examples/01_standalone_sdk/) - Basic agent usage, custom tools, and skills
• Remote Agent Server (examples/02_remote_agent_server/) - Client-server architecture and WebSocket connections
• GitHub Workflows (examples/03_github_workflows/) - CI/CD integration and automated workflows

If you enable public skills with AgentContext(load_public_skills=True), the default OpenHands/extensions marketplace includes, for example, uv and deno skills. Agents can automatically pick up current package-management guidance for repositories that use markers like uv.lock, deno.json, deno.jsonc, or deno.lock.

See examples/01_standalone_sdk/03_activate_skill.py for a minimal example that turns on public skill loading.

For development setup, testing, and contribution guidelines, see DEVELOPMENT.md.

• Join Slack - Connect with the OpenHands community
• GitHub Repository - Source code and issues
• Documentation - Complete documentation

@misc{wang2025openhandssoftwareagentsdk,
      title={The OpenHands Software Agent SDK: A Composable and Extensible Foundation for Production Agents}, 
      author={Xingyao Wang and Simon Rosenberg and Juan Michelini and Calvin Smith and Hoang Tran and Engel Nyst and Rohit Malhotra and Xuhui Zhou and Valerie Chen and Robert Brennan and Graham Neubig},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2511.03690},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.SE},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.03690}, 
}