Installing Nanobot on WSL Ubuntu

Recently, I decided to install Nanobot on my WSL Ubuntu environment.

Step 1: Preparing the Environment

I started by updating my system and installing the necessary packages:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install python3-full python3-venv git

Step 2: Cloning Nanobot

Next, I cloned the Nanobot repository from GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/HKUDS/nanobot.git
cd nanobot

Step 3: Creating a Virtual Environment

When I tried to install Nanobot directly with pip install -e ., I hit the following error:

error: externally-managed-environment
× This environment is externally managed
╰─> To install Python packages system-wide, try apt install...

This happened because Ubuntu now protects the system Python environment (PEP 668). The solution was to create a virtual environment:

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

Step 4: Installing Nanobot

Inside the virtual environment, I upgraded pip and installed Nanobot:

pip install --upgrade pip
pip install -e .

Step 5: Configuring Nanobot

I needed to configure Nanobot with my API key. I copied my existing config file from Windows into WSL:

mkdir -p ~/.nanobot
cp /mnt/c/Users/oktay/.nanobot/config.json ~/.nanobot/

Alternatively, I could have created a symlink to always share the same config:

ln -s /mnt/c/Users/oktay/.nanobot/config.json ~/.nanobot/config.json

Step 6: Facing the API Key Error

When I ran nanobot agent, I got:

Error: No API key configured for provider 'None'.

The fix was to ensure my ~/.nanobot/config.json contained the correct key:

{
  "api_key": "YOUR_OPENAI_API_KEY",
  "model": "gpt-4o-mini",
  "webui": true
}

Step 7: Running Nanobot

Finally, I launched Nanobot inside the virtual environment:

cd ~/nanobot
source .venv/bin/activate
nanobot agent

With the correct configuration, Nanobot started successfully, and the WebUI became available at http://127.0.0.1:8765.

Conclusion

Installing Nanobot on WSL Ubuntu was straightforward once I understood the new Python environment restrictions. The key lessons were:

• Always use a virtual environment to avoid conflicts with system Python.
• Keep your config file in ~/.nanobot/config.json with the correct API key.
• Symlinking the config file from Windows ensures both environments stay in sync.

Now Nanobot runs smoothly on my WSL setup, ready for experiments and development.

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