What Is Astron Agent? A Plain-English Guide to the Enterprise Agentic Workflow Platform

Audience: junior-college graduates in IT, automation, or business informatics; tech leads who need a quick PoC; anyone who keeps hearing “agent”, “RPA”, “MCP” and still wonders what they actually do.
Take-away: in 30 minutes you will understand the architecture, the install steps, the usual pitfalls, and—most importantly—how many staff hours this thing can save you every month.

1. The three questions everyone asks first

Question One-sentence answer
Is Astron Agent a low-code toy, an RPA tool, or a ChatGPT wrapper? It drags-and-drops workflows, runs cross-system bots, and calls LLMs in one closed loop—an “agentic workflow” platform.
Does the open-source edition leave out the good stuff? No. The repo ships the same core that powers iFlytek’s commercial cloud, including high-availability clustering, fine-grained auth, and the tool market. You just bring your own GPU.
How long to get a first demo? Ten minutes on a decent laptop: clone → edit five lines → docker compose up → log in.

2. One glance at the five pillars

Module Pain point How Astron Agent solves it
1. Workflow designer Business rules change daily; code is brittle Drag LLM nodes, API calls, RPA scripts onto a canvas; version in Git
2. Model gateway Some teams want GPT-4, others a local Llama One reverse-proxy that load-balances, keys, and audits every call
3. AI & MCP tools Need voice-to-text, OCR, contract check? Building takes months One-click “plug-ins” proven by millions of iFlytek cloud calls
4. RPA engine Legacy systems lack APIs; Excel tennis is killing morale Robot clicks the UI for you—and the LLM can decide when to click
5. Team spaces Contractors paste test passwords in WeChat Project-role-key isolation + 180-day audit trail out of the box

3. Real story: a purchase-approval agent built in 30 min

Scene: 500-employee manufacturer.
Old pain: approval hops across four systems—ERP → OA → Finance → Tax—eating two staff hours daily.
New flow:

  1. Trigger node
    Polls the ERP purchase_order table for status = “pending approval”.

  2. LLM decision node
    Sends order JSON to the model with prompt:
    “Return true if amount > 100 k USD and contains imported items.”

  3. RPA node
    Opens OA in headless Chrome, fills order ID, uploads attachment, clicks submit, grabs approval ID.

  4. Conditional branch
    Amount > 100 k? Call tax API to verify invoice; else close ticket.

  5. Notify node
    Feishu bot pushes a card: order No., approval No., ETA 8 min.

Results

  • Head-count: 1 FTE → 0
  • Lead-time: 2 h → 8 min
  • Errors: 3 per month → 0

4. 10-minute quick start (Docker Compose)

Prerequisites

  • CPU ≥ 4 cores, RAM ≥ 8 GB, free disk ≥ 20 GB
  • Docker & Docker Compose v2 already installed

Step 1 Clone

git clone https://github.com/iflytek/astron-agent.git
cd astron-agent/docker/astronAgent

Step 2 Configure

cp .env.example .env
nano .env          # or vim; change at least 3 lines

Must-edit lines:

  • BASE_URL=http://YOUR_IP:80
  • DB_PASSWORD=SomethingStrong
  • CASDOOR_ADMIN_PASSWORD=SomethingDifferent

Step 3 Fire it up

docker compose -f docker-compose-with-auth.yaml up -d

Step 4 Check

Browser → http://YOUR_IP
Login page loads → success.
Default creds: admin / 123 (you’ll be forced to change).

Step 5 Shut down (when done)

docker compose -f docker-compose-with-auth.yaml down

5. Directory map—where do I hack?

astron-agent/
├─ docker/astronAgent          # one-launch scripts
├─ astron-server               # Java backend (Spring)
├─ astron-web                  # React frontend
├─ astron-rpa                  # Python robot (headless Chrome)
├─ astron-mcp                  # tool-market gateway
└─ docs/                       # Markdown manuals

6. Top gotchas (collected from GitHub Issues)

Symptom Root cause Fix
Casdoor 502 Gateway Port 8000 conflicts with local Nginx set CASDOOR_PORT=18000, restart
RPA node white screen Browser image not pulled docker pull chromedp/headless-shell:latest manually
LLM 429 rate limit Demo API key throttled add your own key in Model Gateway
Upload > 5 MB fails Default nginx limit edit client_max_body_size 50M in astron-web/nginx.conf

7. Kubernetes? Helm charts are cooking

  • Status: Charts in internal beta, not in public repo yet.
  • Planned features:

    • Auto ingress/istio
    • PVC templates for ceph/nfs
    • Horizontal pod autoscaler for astron-server (tested up to 20 pods)
  • Early adopters: raw YAMLs already live in manifests/—kubectl apply -f at your own risk.

8. Licence reality check—Apache 2.0 means business

Scenario Allowed? Notes
Internal corporate use ✅ Unlimited seats & nodes
SaaS product using modified code ✅ Keep original LICENSE file and copyright notice
Re-brand logo ✅ Trademark clause §6: don’t imply endorsement
Patent-then-close-source ❌ Once you distribute, derivative work stays Apache 2.0

9. What to read next—official roadmap

  1. Make your first workflow → Quick-start
  2. Wire company SSO → Deployment Guide with Auth
  3. Write a custom tool → Developer Guide
  4. Steal battle-tested cases → Use-case Stories
  5. Hit a wall → FAQ

10. Closing the loop—turn “agents” into weekly KPIs

Everybody talks about LLMs; few talk about operations:

  • Can you roll back a prompt like you roll back Java code?
  • Can you prove who called which model at 2 a.m.?
  • Can you scale to 200 bots without spawning 200 VMs?

Astron Agent open-sources those boring-but-vital layers.
If you’re tired of paying overtime just to shuffle Excel between SAP and a 1998 FoxPro relic, clone the repo at lunch.
Success metric is simple: next time finance asks “why does this report still need three people,” hit Run, grab coffee, and paste the 8-minute timestamp into Slack.
Numbers speak louder than buzzwords.