Hi everyone,

I’m new to this field and still learning, backend setup, and multi-service projects, so I might be missing something simple.

I’m trying to run the open-source project prism-ai-deep-research locally on Windows 11 using Docker Desktop and WSL2.

Here’s what I did step by step:

Installed Docker Desktop

Enabled WSL2

Cloned the repository

Created the required environment files


I created these files:

core/docker.env
api/docker.env
client/.env

In core/docker.env I added:

OPENAI_API_KEY
SERPER_API_KEY

In api/docker.env I added:

DATABASE_URL=postgresql://prism:prism@postgres:5432/prism_db
REDIS_URL=redis://redis:6379
OFFLINE_MODE=true

In client/.env I added:

NEXT_PUBLIC_API_URL=http://localhost:3001/api
NEXT_PUBLIC_WS_URL=ws://localhost:8080/ws

Then I ran:

docker compose down
docker compose up --build

The build completes successfully.

Postgres container is healthy.
Redis container is healthy.
Worker container starts properly.
Client container starts and shows Next.js ready.

But the API container exits with code 1 and shows this error:

Error: Missing API key. Pass it to the constructor new Resend("re_123")

From the logs it looks like it fails inside node_modules/resend.

So I think it requires a Resend API key for email functionality.

Everything else seems to be working correctly, but the API container keeps crashing due to this missing key.

I would appreciate any guidance on what I’m doing wrong or what I’m missing.

Thanks.

Need help configuring env files correctly