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Self-Host

Learn about how to self-host Khoj on your own machine.

Benefits to self-hosting:

  1. Privacy: Your data will never have to leave your private network. You can even use Khoj without an internet connection if deployed on your personal computer.
  2. Customization: You can customize Khoj to your liking, from models, to host URL, to feature enablement.

Setup​

These are the general setup instructions for self-hosted Khoj.

  • Make sure python and pip are installed on your machine
  • Check the Khoj Emacs docs to setup Khoj with Emacs
    It's simpler as it can skip the server install, run and configure step below.
  • Check the Khoj Obsidian docs to setup Khoj with Obsidian
    Its simpler as it can skip the configure step below.

For Installation, you can either use Docker or install the Khoj server locally.

Offline Model + GPU

If you want to use the offline chat model and you have a GPU, you should use Installation Option 2 - local setup via the Python package directly. Our Docker image doesn't currently support running the offline chat model on GPU, making inference times really slow.

Installation Option 1 (Docker)​

Prerequisites​

  1. Install Docker Engine. See official instructions.
  2. Ensure you have Docker Compose. See official instructions.

Setup​

Use the sample docker-compose in Github to run Khoj in Docker. Start by configuring all the environment variables to your choosing. Your admin account will automatically be created based on the admin credentials in that file, so pay attention to those. To start the container, run the following command in the same directory as the docker-compose.yml file. This will automatically setup the database and run the Khoj server.

docker-compose up

Khoj should now be running at http://localhost:42110. You can see the web UI in your browser.

Installation Option 2 (Local)​

Prerequisites​

Install Postgres (with PgVector)​

Khoj uses the pgvector package to store embeddings of your index in a Postgres database. In order 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

Install package​

Local Server Setup​

Run the following command in your terminal to install the Khoj backend.

# ARM/M1+ Machines
MAKE_ARGS="-DLLAMA_METAL=on" python -m pip install khoj-assistant

# Intel Machines
python -m pip install khoj-assistant
Local Server Start​

Before getting started, configure the following environment variables in your terminal for the first run

export KHOJ_ADMIN_EMAIL=<your-email>
export KHOJ_ADMIN_PASSWORD=<your-password>

Run the following command from your terminal to start the Khoj backend and open Khoj in your browser.

khoj --anonymous-mode

--anonymous-mode allows you to run the server without setting up Google credentials for login. This allows you to use any of the clients without a login wall. If you want to use Google login, you can skip this flag, but you will have to add your Google developer credentials.

On the first run, you will be prompted to input credentials for your admin account and do some basic configuration for your chat model settings. Once created, you can go to http://localhost:42110/server/admin and login with the credentials you just created.

Khoj should now be running at http://localhost:42110. You can see the web UI in your browser.

Note: To start Khoj automatically in the background use Task scheduler on Windows or Cron on Mac, Linux (e.g with @reboot khoj)

Setup Notes​

You can use Khoj with a custom domain as well. To do so, you need to set the KHOJ_DOMAIN environment variable to your domain (e.g., export KHOJ_DOMAIN=my-khoj-domain.com or add it to your docker-compose.yml). By default, the Khoj server you set up will not be accessible outside of localhost or 127.0.0.1.

Without HTTPS certificate

To expose Khoj on a custom domain over the public internet, use of an SSL certificate is strongly recommended. You can use Let's Encrypt to get a free SSL certificate for your domain.

To disable HTTPS, set the KHOJ_NO_HTTPS environment variable to True. This can be useful if Khoj is only accessible behind a secure, private network.

2. Configure​

  1. Go to http://localhost:42110/server/admin and login with your admin credentials.

Configure Chat Model​

Configure OpenAI or a custom OpenAI-compatible proxy server​
  1. Go to the OpenAI settings in the server admin settings to add an OpenAI processor conversation config. This is where you set your API key and server API base URL. The API base URL is optional - it's only relevant if you're using another OpenAI-compatible proxy server.
  2. Go over to configure your chat model options. Set the chat-model field to a supported chat model1 of your choice. For example, you can specify gpt-4-turbo-preview if you're using OpenAI.
    • Make sure to set the model-type field to OpenAI.
    • The tokenizer and max-prompt-size fields are optional. Set them only if you're sure of the tokenizer or token limit for the model you're using. Contact us if you're unsure what to do here.
Configure Offline Chat​
  1. No need to setup a conversation processor config!
  2. Go over to configure your chat model options. Set the chat-model field to a supported chat model1 of your choice. For example, we recommend NousResearch/Hermes-2-Pro-Mistral-7B-GGUF, but any gguf model on huggingface should work.
  • Make sure to set the model-type to Offline. Do not set openai config.
  • The tokenizer and max-prompt-size fields are optional. Set them only when using a non-standard model (i.e not mistral, gpt or llama2 model) when you know the token limit.

Share your data​

  1. Select files and folders to index using the desktop client. When you click 'Save', the files will be sent to your server for indexing.
    • Select Notion workspaces and Github repositories to index using the web interface.
Note

Using Safari on Mac? You might not be able to login to the admin panel. Try using Chrome or Firefox instead.

3. Download the desktop client (Optional)​

You can use our desktop executables to select file paths and folders to index. You can simply select the folders or files, and they'll be automatically uploaded to the server. Once you specify a file or file path, you don't need to update the configuration again; it will grab any data diffs dynamically over time.

To download the latest desktop client, go to https://download.khoj.dev and the correct executable for your OS will automatically start downloading. You can also go to https://khoj.dev/downloads to explicitly download your image of choice. Once downloaded, you can configure your folders for indexing using the settings tab. To set your chat configuration, you'll have to use the web interface for the Khoj server you setup in the previous step.

To use the desktop client, you need to go to your Khoj server's settings page (http://localhost:42110/config) and copy the API key. Then, paste it into the desktop client's settings page. Once you've done that, you can select files and folders to index. Set the desktop client settings to use http://127.0.0.1:42110 as the host URL.

4. Install Client Plugins (Optional)​

Khoj exposes a web interface to search, chat and configure by default.
The optional steps below allow using Khoj from within an existing application like Obsidian or Emacs.

  • Khoj Obsidian:
    Install the Khoj Obsidian plugin

  • Khoj Emacs:
    Install khoj.el

Setup host URL​

To configure your host URL on your clients when self-hosting, use http://127.0.0.1:42110. This is the default port for the Khoj server. Note that localhost will not work.

5. Use Khoj 🚀​

You can head to http://localhost:42110 to use the web interface. You can also use the desktop client to search and chat.

Upgrade​

Upgrade Khoj Server​

pip install --upgrade khoj-assistant

Note: To upgrade to the latest pre-release version of the khoj server run below command

Uninstall​

Uninstall Khoj Server​

# uninstall khoj server
pip uninstall khoj-assistant

# delete khoj postgres db
dropdb khoj -U postgres

Troubleshoot​

Dependency conflict when trying to install Khoj python package with pip​

  • Reason: When conflicting dependency versions are required by Khoj vs other python packages installed on your system
  • Fix: Install Khoj in a python virtual environment using venv or pipx to avoid this dependency conflicts
  • Process:
    1. Install pipx
    2. Use pipx to install Khoj to avoid dependency conflicts with other python packages. 
      pipx install khoj-assistant
    3. Now start khoj using the standard steps described earlier

Install fails while building Tokenizer dependency​

  • Details: pip install khoj-assistant fails while building the tokenizers dependency. Complains about Rust.
  • Fix: Install Rust to build the tokenizers package. For example on Mac run: 
    brew install rustup
    rustup-init
    source ~/.cargo/env
  • Refer: Issue with Fix for more details

Khoj in Docker errors out with "Killed" in error message​

Footnotes​

  1. Khoj, by default, can use OpenAI GPT3.5+ chat models or GGUF chat models. See this section on how to locally use OpenAI-format compatible proxy servers. ↩ ↩2