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Frontends

Runtime guide

Use this section when you have an ADK agent and want to put it behind an application UI. ADK owns agent execution, sessions, tools, and events. The frontend layer adds a stable client contract for chat, generative UI, browser tools, mobile surfaces, and messaging platforms on top of that runtime.

ADK Web is the development UI for testing agents. For an application you ship to users, you connect your own frontend to the agent through a protocol the frontend can consume. The pages in this section document that path with AG-UI, an open, event-based protocol for agent-to-user interaction that ADK supports through the ag-ui-adk package.

Architecture

The frontend path has three parts:

  1. Your ADK agent runs in Python, the same way it runs under adk web or adk api_server.
  2. The ag-ui-adk middleware exposes that agent as an AG-UI endpoint. It translates ADK events into AG-UI events and turns tool results from the frontend back into ADK function responses.
  3. An AG-UI client renders the event stream and sends user input, tool results, and state back to the endpoint.
flowchart LR
  User["User surface"] --> Client["AG-UI client"]
  Client --> AGUI["ag-ui-adk endpoint"]
  AGUI --> ADK["ADK agent"]

The API server also streams events over /run_sse, and that stream is the right tool for scripts and tests. AG-UI adds a client-facing contract on top: typed events for text, tool calls, and shared state, a defined way for the frontend to return tool results, and client SDKs that implement the protocol. Frontend code should consume AG-UI rather than parse ADK's runtime events directly.

Choose a client

Any client that speaks AG-UI can drive an ADK agent:

Client Use it for
CopilotKit React, Angular, Vue, and React Native applications, plus Slack. Packaged chat components, frontend tools, generative UI, and human-in-the-loop hooks.
Community SDKs AG-UI clients for Kotlin, Java, and Go, and a TypeScript CLI example.
Your own client Any HTTP client that posts a run and reads the event stream. The AG-UI client SDK handles the protocol details.

The client-side examples in this section use CopilotKit. The backend setup is the same for every client.

Implementation path

  1. Build and debug the agent in ADK Web.
  2. Add the AG-UI endpoint with ag-ui-adk.
  3. Connect the client for the surface you are building.
  4. Add generative UI or interaction patterns only when the user experience needs them.

Keep credentials, session lookup, authorization, and tool execution policy on the backend side of the AG-UI boundary. Keep rendering, local interaction state, client tools, and user approval UI in the frontend.