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What You’ll See

The demo is a real e-commerce shop (ATH Shop) where:
  • Humans can browse products, add to cart, and check out normally
  • An AI agent can do the same — but only after the user approves in their browser
By the end of this page, you’ll have watched an AI agent:
  1. Discover the shop’s ATH endpoints
  2. Register itself with the shop
  3. Ask the user for permission (user sees a consent page in the browser)
  4. Get a scoped access token
  5. Browse products, add to cart, and place an order
  6. Revoke its own access when done

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Prerequisites

  • Docker and Docker Compose installed
  • A terminal
That’s it. No Node.js, no Python, no keys to generate.

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Step 1: Clone and Start

git clone https://github.com/ath-protocol/demo.git
cd demo
Add these entries to your /etc/hosts file: 
# On Mac/Linux:
echo "127.0.0.1 ath-shop.local agent.ath.local gateway.ath.local" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts
Start the demo in native mode (agent connects directly to the shop): 
cd demo/native
docker compose up --build
Wait for the output: 
ATH Shop HTTPS server running on https://ath-shop.local:3000
Agent identity server: https://agent.ath.local:4000

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Step 2: Run the Full ATH Flow

In a separate terminal: 
cd demo/native
docker compose up athx-demo
This runs the complete ATH protocol flow. Watch the output — you’ll see each step labeled: 
━━━ STEP 1: Service Discovery ━━━
━━━ STEP 2: Agent Registration (Phase A) ━━━
━━━ STEP 3: Request Authorization (Phase B) ━━━
━━━ STEP 4: User Consent in Browser (Interactive) ━━━
━━━ STEP 5: Token Exchange ━━━
━━━ STEP 6: Access E-Commerce API via ATH Token ━━━
━━━ STEP 7: Revoke Token ━━━
The demo opens a browser, logs in as a test user, navigates to the consent page, and clicks “Authorize” — simulating what a real user would do.

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Step 3: Try Gateway Mode

Want to see the same flow through a gateway (no changes to the shop)? 
cd demo/gateway
docker compose up --build
# In another terminal:
docker compose up athx-demo
In gateway mode, the agent talks to the gateway at gateway.ath.local:4001, and the gateway talks to the shop. The shop doesn’t even know an agent is involved.

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Step 4: Explore Manually

Open https://ath-shop.local:3000 in your browser (accept the self-signed cert). You’ll see a real e-commerce UI where you can:
  • Create an account
  • Browse products
  • Add items to cart
  • Check out
This is the same app the agent interacts with — just through ATH-protected endpoints instead of the web UI.

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What’s Next?

Now that you’ve seen it running, let’s understand what actually happened in those 7 steps:

What Just Happened? →

A line-by-line walkthrough of the demo output