Demo mode

lantern demo starts the whole stack in kiosk mode: every visitor gets a private workspace with sample agents, a guided tour, and no sign-up. The workspace is deleted after 30 minutes. It needs Docker and nothing else: no LLM key.

Kiosk mode answers from recorded replays served by a local fixture server, labels every answer “replay”, and gives each visitor a throwaway tenant that the database itself isolates from every other visitor.

Try it

# From a Lantern checkout. Needs Docker; make demo also needs openssl.
make demo               # builds, starts; prints "demo: http://localhost:3001/kiosk"
make demo-down          # stop and delete all demo data

# Same stack through the CLI (go install ./cmd/lantern from packages/cli):
lantern demo            # builds, waits until healthy, opens the browser (--no-open to skip)
lantern demo --down     # stop and delete all demo data

The stack is a separate compose project named lantern-demo and starts only Postgres, Redis, the control plane, the dashboard and the replay server (no gateway, model router, workflow engine or MinIO). The first run builds images, so it takes a while. The control plane is published on :8080 and the dashboard on :3001, the same host ports as make dev: stop one before starting the other, or set KIOSK_API_PORT and KIOSK_WEB_PORT (both lantern demo and make demo honour them). If something fails to start, use docker compose -p lantern-demo logs.

Press Start demo. The tour has five steps over real pages: the inbox, running an agent (watch the step waterfall), a budget that returns HTTP 402, a signed-receipt check at /proof, and the sandbox view. After 120 seconds without input, or when the 30-minute timer ends, the session is closed and the workspace deleted.

How visitors are isolated

POST /v1/kiosk/session creates a fresh kiosk-<rand> tenant and returns a short-lived JWT with role kiosk. Row-level security is enforced, so visitor B reading visitor A’s run or agent gets 404.
The token cannot write settings, connectors or budgets, mint API keys, or delete the tenant (LANTERN_AUTHZ_ENFORCE=1 is part of the overlay).
A sweep deletes expired tenants through the same erasure code path as DELETE /v1/tenants/{id}, across every table that has a tenant_id column.
No provider key exists in a kiosk tenant. The server refuses to start in kiosk mode if a provider key is set without a fixture base URL.

Reference

Variable	Default	Purpose
`LANTERN_KIOSK`	off	`1` enables the endpoint, sweep and guards. Otherwise `/v1/kiosk/session` is 404.
`LANTERN_KIOSK_ALLOW_PROD`	off	Required to run kiosk in prod/production/staging. Use only on a dedicated demo host.
`LANTERN_KIOSK_TTL_MIN`	30	Session lifetime in minutes.
`LANTERN_KIOSK_SWEEP_SEC`	60	How often expired sessions are purged.
`LANTERN_KIOSK_MAX_SESSIONS`	20	Live-session cap; over it returns 503.
`LANTERN_KIOSK_IP_PER_HOUR`	3	Sessions per client address per hour; over it returns 429.
`KIOSK_JWT_SECRET`	random per start	Compose overlay. Required; `make demo` and `lantern demo` generate a random one. The control-plane refuses to start kiosk mode with an empty or dev-default `JWT_SECRET`.

Kiosk mode also requires LANTERN_RLS_ENFORCE=1, LANTERN_AUTHZ_ENFORCE=1 and an explicit JWT_SECRET; the compose overlay infra/docker/docker-compose.kiosk.yml sets all of them and points LANTERN_LLM_BASEURL_OPENAI/_ANTHROPIC at the replay server.

Limits

Answers are recorded, not live. A live-model kiosk needs a separate, capped platform key and is not built.
The per-address limit is in-memory and per process; behind a proxy all visitors share one address.
The sandbox step shows the view only; the overlay does not start the microVM runtime.