Run a node & earn

Have a GPU — a gaming card, a Mac with lots of unified memory, or a cluster? Serve models on Porten and get paid for the tokens you produce. A node is a small agent (porten) that runs an inference engine and streams results back to the Hub.

Install in one line

On any Mac or Linux box:

curl -fsSL https://porten.ai/install.sh | sh

It downloads the agent, picks an engine (uses Ollama if it's running, otherwise the built-in engine), enrolls the machine through your browser — you approve it in the portal, no token to paste — and installs the background service. On a Mac it installs the desktop app instead.

That's it: the machine appears under Earn and starts serving.

porten login prints a short code and a URL. Open it on any device, sign in, and approve the machine — its key is bound to your account at that moment. The agent then keeps a persistent connection to the Hub and registers what it can serve; the Hub routes matching requests to it, and you're paid per token (see Payouts in the portal).

No screen on the box? Fine — the link prints in the terminal and you approve it from your phone or laptop.

Engines

porten supports several back-ends — pick the one that matches your setup:

Engine	Use when	Notes
`builtin`	Single box, you want the Hub to manage models	Runs `llama-server`; auto-downloads GGUF weights from the catalog's `download_ref` and loads/unloads on demand. This is what powers on-demand loading.
`ollama`	You already run Ollama	The agent advertises an allow-list of your Ollama models.
`openai`	You front a runtime that exposes an OpenAI endpoint	e.g. an exo Mac cluster, vLLM, or llama.cpp server.

Configuration

The installer picks sensible defaults. To tune them, set env vars before porten service install (they're baked into the service unit):

export PORTEN_ENGINE=builtin            # builtin | ollama | openai
export PORTEN_VRAM_BUDGET_MB=24000      # how much VRAM the agent may use
export PORTEN_AUTO_DOWNLOAD_MB=200000   # disk budget for cached weights

For an Ollama node, set PORTEN_ENGINE=ollama and an allow-list (PORTEN_ENGINE_MODELS=llama3.2:3b,deepseek-r1:latest). For a cluster, see Build a combined machine.

The agent runs as a service — launchd on macOS, a systemd --user unit on Linux (run loginctl enable-linger <user> so it survives without a login session).

Automated & bulk setup

For scripted provisioning (cloud-init, fleets of identical machines) you can skip the browser: mint an enrollment token in the portal (Earn → Add node, /earn/add) and bake it in.

porten enroll <token>
porten service install

What "provisionable" means

A built-in node is provisionable: the Hub may fetch and run any enabled catalog model that fits its VRAM budget, on demand. It packs as many demanded models as fit, unloads idle ones, and downloads new weights when something is requested that isn't on disk yet. You set the VRAM and disk budgets; the Hub handles placement.

Ollama / OpenAI-engine nodes serve a fixed set you've installed — they aren't auto-provisioned, and their models aren't idle-evicted by the Hub.

Getting paid

Connect a payout account in the portal. Serving is metered per token; payouts run on a schedule against your served volume. The portal's Earn section shows your nodes, what they're serving, and your earnings.

What to build

See the Hardware guide for which models fit which hardware, and the Thunderbolt cluster guide for pooling multiple Macs into one big node.

📄 Reading as a machine? This page is available as raw Markdown at https://porten.ai/docs/running-a-node.md — or grab the whole site via llms.txt / llms-full.txt.