Chat History

Retrieve and inspect user and assistant messages from persisted agent sessions.

Demonstrates retrieving chat history from agent sessions stored in PostgresDb.

chat_history.py
"""
Chat History
============

Demonstrates retrieving chat history from agent sessions stored in PostgresDb.
"""

from agno.agent.agent import Agent
from agno.db.postgres import PostgresDb
from agno.models.openai import OpenAIChat

# ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Setup
# ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
db_url = "postgresql+psycopg://ai:ai@localhost:5532/ai"
db = PostgresDb(db_url=db_url, session_table="sessions")

# ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Create Agent
# ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
agent = Agent(
    model=OpenAIChat(id="gpt-5.2"),
    db=db,
    session_id="chat_history",
    instructions="You are a helpful assistant that can answer questions about space and oceans.",
    add_history_to_context=True,
)

# ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Run Agent
# ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
if __name__ == "__main__":
    agent.print_response("Tell me a new interesting fact about space")
    print(agent.get_chat_history())

    agent.print_response("Tell me a new interesting fact about oceans")
    print(agent.get_chat_history())

get_chat_history() returns user and assistant messages, excluding system messages and tool-result messages. Use the session’s get_messages() method when you need configurable message filtering.

Run the Example

Set up your virtual environment

uv venv --python 3.12
source .venv/bin/activate

Install dependencies

uv pip install -U agno "psycopg[binary]" openai sqlalchemy

Export your OpenAI API key

export OPENAI_API_KEY="your_openai_api_key_here"

Run PgVector

docker run -d \
  -e POSTGRES_DB=ai \
  -e POSTGRES_USER=ai \
  -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=ai \
  -e PGDATA=/var/lib/postgresql \
  -v pgvolume:/var/lib/postgresql \
  -p 5532:5432 \
  --name pgvector \
  agnohq/pgvector:18

Run the example

Save the code above as chat_history.py, then run:

python chat_history.py

Full source: cookbook/06_storage/03_chat_history.py