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A fresh PipesHub has nothing to search until you connect a source, and connecting a real one takes an OAuth round-trip you may not want to do just to see what the product does. The Demo connector fills that gap: it loads Acme Corp, a small fictional company, and nothing else — no external service is contacted.
Available from the first release after 0.8.0. On 0.8.0 and earlier the Demo connector is not in the connectors list.

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What you get

Acme Corp is 41 records across five systems, loaded the way real connectors load them, so search, citations and permissions behave exactly as they would with your own data: Two story lines run through it: a billing-retry incident (why the payment service changed, and who decided), and an export-timeout problem that travels from customer cases through support into engineering. Citations read “GitHub · Pull request”, “Jira · Ticket” and so on. Once the connector is active, the new-chat landing offers five questions the data was written to answer. The first is the one to try:
Why was the payment service architecture changed, and how was the decision made?
A good answer cites a pull request, an incident, a Slack thread and a design document together — the point being that no single source holds the whole story.

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Load it from the browser

  1. Go to Workspace → Connectors and pick Demo (it has its own group in the list).
  2. Add it as a team connector. It needs no credentials.
  3. Enable it. The sync takes well under a minute; records index over the next minute or two.
  4. Open a new chat. The five questions appear under the input.
The person who adds the connector automatically sees everything except the restricted pricing material (see below).
Keep the connector’s name descriptive. In Agent mode the assistant chooses which sources to search by their names; a name like “Acme Corp demo data: GitHub, Jira, Slack, Google Drive and ServiceNow” tells it what is inside. That is the name the headless setup uses.

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Load it headlessly

If you are scripting first-run with bootstrap-first-run.sh, add to the env file:
The script creates the connector and starts its sync after configuring the LLM and minting the token. Everything else about the script is unchanged.

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Two people who see different things

The most convincing thing the demo shows is that the same question gets different answers for different people. Acme has two employees who can sign in: Ask both “What is the enterprise pricing strategy for 2026?” — Alice gets nothing relevant, Bob gets the document, cited from Google Drive. The person who added the connector is in the same two groups as Alice, so they see what she sees and get no answer to that question either. That is the permission check working, not a missing record, and the chat landing says so: for anyone who can’t see the pricing document, that question carries a lock and “Pricing committee only, so you’ll get no answer here.” Admins are also told to sign in as bob@acme-demo.example to see the answer, when that account exists. Nobody else in your organisation is in any of Acme’s groups, so the demo shows them nothing: only the person who added it, Alice and Bob see its records. To create them you need a business account (individual accounts are single-user) and the headless script:
Choose the password per installation — for example openssl rand -base64 12 with a capital letter and a symbol added — and never reuse a value from documentation. Both accounts are created with it before the connector syncs, so their group memberships attach immediately. There is no email involved.
These are real accounts in your organisation with a password you chose. Keep the instance on localhost while they exist, or use them only on a throwaway instance; anyone who can reach the sign-in page and knows the password can sign in as Alice or Bob. When you are done, turn the demo off for everyone, which stops them signing in, or delete them under Workspace → Users.

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Show or hide it

The demo never mixes silently into your company’s answers. Each person decides whether Acme’s records appear in their own answers, search and record lists:
  • The default: the demo is shown while your organisation has no data of its own, and hidden once a source of your own has indexed records.
  • Your own choice: Profile → Demo data has a switch, Show Acme Corp demo data in my answers, search and records. Choosing overrides the default, and Use the default goes back to it. The chat landing also offers Hide demo data, with a few seconds to undo.
Hiding changes only what you see. Nothing is deleted, and everyone else keeps their own setting. In chat answers, sources from the demo carry a Demo badge on their citations, so a fictional Slack thread cited next to a real one is marked. Search results and record lists show only the system each record imitates (Slack, GitHub, …), without the badge.

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Turn it off for everyone

Admins also see Offer the demo to everyone in Profile → Demo data. Turning it off hides the demo from everyone’s answers, search and records, whatever they chose, and stops the sample accounts (Alice, Bob) signing in. Nothing is deleted: turn it back on and each person’s own choice, and the sample accounts’ sign-in, come back.

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Remove it

Once your own data is indexed, admins see a notice on the chat landing and on the Connectors page, The Acme Corp demo data is still in your workspace, with three choices:
  • Turn off for everyone — hides it as described above, deleting nothing.
  • Remove permanently — deletes the Demo connector with all of its records, groups and permissions. A box, ticked by default, also deletes the sample accounts, since anyone who knows their starting password can sign in as them.
  • Keep for now — hides the notice in this browser for a week; other admins, or you in another browser, still see it. The other two choices apply to the whole organisation.
To do it by hand, delete the Demo connector from Workspace → Connectors. Its records, groups and permissions go with it. If you created Alice and Bob, delete them under Workspace → Users.

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For coding agents

If you are standing up a laptop instance for someone and they have no data ready, the Demo connector is the fastest way to a first cited answer: enable it, wait for health/services, then call pipeshub_search with the first question above. See Local Docker demo.