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Development

Welcome to the development docs of Khoj! Thanks for you interesting in being a contributor ❤️. Open source contributors are a corner-store of the Khoj community. We welcome all contributions, big or small.

To get started with contributing, check out the official GitHub docs on contributing to an open-source project.

Join the Discord server and click the ✅ for the question "Are you interested in becoming a contributor?" in the #welcome-and-rules channel. This will give you access to the #contributors channel where you can ask questions and get help from other contributors.

If you're looking for a place to get started, check out the list of Github Issues with the tag good first issue to find issues that are good for first-time contributors.

Local Server Installation​

Using Pip​

1. Khoj Installation​

# Get Khoj Code
git clone https://github.com/khoj-ai/khoj && cd khoj

# Create, Activate Virtual Environment
python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate

# For MacOS or zsh users run this
pip install -e '.[dev]'

2. Postgres Installation & Setup​

Khoj uses the pgvector package to store embeddings of your index in a Postgres database. To use this, you need to have Postgres installed.

Install Postgres.app. This comes pre-installed with pgvector and relevant dependencies.

Create the Khoj database​

Make sure to update your environment variables to match your Postgres configuration if you're using a different name. The default values should work for most people. When prompted for a password, you can use the default password postgres, or configure it to your preference. Make sure to set the environment variable POSTGRES_PASSWORD to the same value as the password you set here.

createdb khoj -U postgres --password

3. Build the front-end assets​

cd src/interface/web/
yarn install
yarn export

You can optionally use yarn dev to start a development server for the front-end which will be available at http://localhost:3000. This is especially useful if you're making changes to the front-end code, but not necessary for running Khoj. Note that streaming does not work on the dev server due to how it is handled with SSR in Next.js.

Always run yarn export to test your front-end changes on http://localhost:42110 before creating a PR.

4. Run​

  1. Start Khoj 
    khoj -vv
  2. Configure Khoj
    • Via the Desktop application: Add files, directories to index using the settings page of your desktop application. Click "Save" to immediately trigger indexing.

Note: Wait after configuration for khoj to Load ML model, generate embeddings and expose API to query notes, images, documents etc specified in config YAML

Windows Installation Notes​

  1. Command khoj Not Recognized
    • Try reactivating the virtual environment and rerunning the khoj command.
    • If it still doesn't work repeat the installation process.
  2. Python Package Missing
    • Use pip install xxx and try running the khoj command.
  3. Command createdb Not Recognized
    • make sure path to postgres binaries is included in environment variables. It usually looks something like
    C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\16\bin
  4. Connection Refused on port xxxx
    • Locate the pg_hba.conf file in the location where postgres was installed.
    • Edit the file to have trust as the method for user postgres, local, and host connections.
    • Below is an example:
host    all             postgres        127.0.0.1/32            trust
# "local" is for Unix domain socket connections only
local   all             all                                     trust
# IPv4 local connections:
host    all             all             127.0.0.1/32            trust
# IPv6 local connections:
host    all             all             ::1/128                 trust
  1. Errors with installing pgvector
    • Reinstall Visual Studio 2022 Build Tools with:
      1. desktop development with c++ selected in workloads
      2. MSVC (C++ Build Tools), Windows 10/11 SDK, and C++/CLI support for build tools selected in individual components.
    • Open the x64 Native Tools Command Prompt as an Administrator
    • Follow the pgvector windows installation instructions in this command prompt.

Using Docker​

Make sure you install the latest version of Docker and Docker Compose.

1. Clone​

git clone https://github.com/khoj-ai/khoj && cd khoj

2. Configure​

  1. Update docker-compose.yml to use relevant environment variables.
  2. Comment out the image line and uncomment the build line in the server service

3. Run​

This will start the Khoj server, and the database.

docker-compose up -d

4. Upgrade​

If you've made changes to the codebase, you'll need to rebuild the Docker image before running the container again.

docker-compose build --no-cache

Update clients​

In whichever clients you're using for testing, you'll need to update the server URL to point to your local server. By default, the local server URL should be http://127.0.0.1:42110.

Validate​

Before Making Changes​

  1. Install Git Hooks for Validation 
    ./scripts/dev_setup.sh
    • This ensures standard code formatting fixes and other checks run automatically on every commit and push
    • Note 1: If pre-commit didn't already get installed, install it via pip install pre-commit
    • Note 2: To run the pre-commit changes manually, use pre-commit run --hook-stage manual --all before creating PR

Before Creating PR​

Note

You should be in an active virtual environment for Khoj in order to run the unit tests and linter.

  1. Ensure that you have a Github Issue that can be linked to the PR. If not, create one. Make sure you've tagged one of the maintainers to the issue. This will ensure that the maintainers are notified of the PR and can review it. It's best discuss the code design on an existing issue or Discord thread before creating a PR. This helps get your PR merged faster.
  2. Run unit tests. 
    pytest
  3. Run the linter. 
    mypy
  4. Think about how to add unit tests to verify the functionality you're adding in the PR. If you're not sure how to do this, ask for help in the Github issue or on Discord's #contributors channel.

After Creating PR​

  1. Automated validation workflows should run for every PR. Tag one of the maintainers in the PR to trigger it.

Obsidian Plugin Development​

Plugin development setup​

The core code for the Obsidian plugin is under src/interface/obsidian. The file main.ts is a good place to start.

  1. In your CLI, go to the directory src/interface/obsidian in the Khoj repository.
  2. Run yarn install to install the dependencies.
  3. Run yarn dev to start the development server. This will continually rebuild the plugin as you make changes to the code.
    • Your code changes will be outputted to a file called main.js in the obsidian directory.

Loading your development plugin in Obsidian​

  1. Make sure you have the Khoj plugin installed in Obsidian. See the plugin page.
  2. Open Obsidian and go to your settings (gear icon in the bottom left corner)
  3. Click on 'Community Plugins' in the left panel
  4. Next to the 'Installed Plugins' heading, click on the folder icon to open the folder with the plugin's source code.
  5. Open the khoj folder in the file explorer that opens. You'll see a file called main.js in this folder. To test your changes, replace this file with the main.js file that was generated by the development server in the previous section.

Create Khoj Release (Only for Maintainers)​

Follow the steps below to release Khoj. This will create a stable release of Khoj on Pypi, Melpa and Obsidian. It will also create desktop apps of Khoj and attach them to the latest release.

  1. Create and tag release commit by running the bump_version script. The release commit sets version number in required metadata files.
./scripts/bump_version.sh -c "<release_version>"
  1. Push commit and then the tag to trigger the release workflow to create Release with auto generated release notes.
git push origin master  # push release commit to khoj repository
git push origin <release_version>  # push release tag to khoj repository
  1. [Optional] Update the Release Notes to highlight new features, fixes and updates

Architecture​

Visualize Codebase​

Interactive Visualization

Visualize Khoj Obsidian Plugin Codebase​