The Umbraco AI Kitchen Sink Install

4 min read

Since we released Umbraco AI, one of the most common bits of feedback I’ve heard is: “I want to try it, but I’m not sure which packages to install.” That’s fair. With a core package, five providers, prompt templates, agents, and a copilot UI, there’s a lot of moving parts. If you just want to kick the tyres and see what it can do, figuring out the right combination of NuGet packages shouldn’t be the hard part.

So I put together a quick install script that gives you everything. One script, every package, plus seed data so there’s actually something to look at when you log in. The base script was created with the help of Paul Seal’s excellent Package Script Writer — if you haven’t used it before, it’s a great tool for generating Umbraco install scripts.

The Script

You can grab it from this gist, but here’s the full thing:

# Ensure we have the latest Umbraco templates
dotnet new install Umbraco.Templates --force

# Create solution/project
dotnet new sln --name "Umbraco.AI.Demo"
dotnet new umbraco --force -n "Umbraco.AI.Demo" 
  --friendly-name "Administrator" 
  --email "admin@example.com" 
  --password "password1234" 
  --development-database-type SQLite
dotnet sln add "Umbraco.AI.Demo"

# Add starter kit
dotnet add "Umbraco.AI.Demo" package clean

# Add Umbraco AI
dotnet add "Umbraco.AI.Demo" package Umbraco.AI

# Add Umbraco AI addons
dotnet add "Umbraco.AI.Demo" package Umbraco.AI.Prompt
dotnet add "Umbraco.AI.Demo" package Umbraco.AI.Agent --prerelease
dotnet add "Umbraco.AI.Demo" package Umbraco.AI.Agent.Copilot --prerelease

# Add all AI providers
dotnet add "Umbraco.AI.Demo" package Umbraco.AI.Amazon
dotnet add "Umbraco.AI.Demo" package Umbraco.AI.Anthropic
dotnet add "Umbraco.AI.Demo" package Umbraco.AI.Google
dotnet add "Umbraco.AI.Demo" package Umbraco.AI.MicrosoftFoundry
dotnet add "Umbraco.AI.Demo" package Umbraco.AI.OpenAI

# Seed demo data
curl -o Umbraco.AI.Demo/UmbracoAISeedData.cs 
  https://gist.githubusercontent.com/mattbrailsford/199d0b45e926ffb122fa96467039bd90/raw/UmbracoAISeedData.cs?v=2

dotnet run --project "Umbraco.AI.Demo"

It creates a fresh Umbraco site with SQLite (no database setup needed), installs the Clean starter kit so you have some content to work with, adds every Umbraco AI package, downloads a seed data file, and runs the site. That’s it.

What Gets Seeded

The seed data file is a simple Umbraco composer that runs on first startup. It checks whether the demo data already exists and skips if so, making it safe to restart the site without duplicating anything.

Here’s what it creates:

A Brand Voice Context

A context resource with tone guidelines, target audience, style rules, and patterns to avoid. This gets injected into AI requests automatically, so responses follow your brand voice without you having to repeat instructions every time.

An OpenAI Connection

A connection configured for OpenAI. You’ll need to drop your own API key in — the seed data uses a placeholder YOUR_OPENAI_API_KEY that you’ll want to update in the backoffice once you log in.

A Default Chat Profile

A profile that combines the OpenAI connection with GPT-4o, sets a reasonable temperature, and attaches the brand voice context. This profile is also configured as the default for chat operations.

Two Prompt Templates

  • Summarize — Condenses content into a concise paragraph. Scoped to text areas and text boxes, generates 3 options to choose from.
  • SEO Description — Generates a 150-160 character meta description with relevant keywords. Includes the full page context so it can reference surrounding content.

Both appear as property actions in the backoffice, so editors can trigger them directly from the content they’re working on.

Three AI Agents

  • Content Assistant — A general-purpose helper for creating and editing content, scoped to the Content section.
  • Media Assistant — Focused on writing alt text, captions, and descriptions for media assets, scoped to the Media section.
  • Legal Specialist — Helps draft terms and conditions, privacy policies, and disclaimers, scoped to the Content section.

All three are surfaced through the Copilot chat sidebar, so you can start chatting with them straight away.

Getting It Running

  1. Save the script as install.ps1
  2. Run it: ./install.ps1
  3. Wait for the site to start (you’ll see the usual Umbraco startup output)
  4. Open the URL shown in the console
  5. Log in with admin@example.com / password1234
  6. Head to the AI section in Settings and update the OpenAI connection with your API key
  7. Start exploring

The prompts will show up as property actions when editing content, and the agents will be available in the Copilot sidebar.

Why This Exists

The goal here isn’t to prescribe how you should set up Umbraco AI in production. It’s to remove the friction of getting started. Instead of reading docs to figure out which of the dozen-plus packages you need, you get a working site with real examples in about a minute. From there, you can poke around, see how things are configured, and start forming your own opinions about what you’d actually use.

If you want to swap OpenAI for Anthropic or Google, the providers are already installed — just create a new connection and update your profile. If you want to tweak the prompts or agents, they’re all editable in the backoffice.

Hopefully this makes it a bit easier to get hands-on with Umbraco AI. Give it a go and let me know what you think.

Until next time 👋