Self-Host | Khoj AI (original) (raw)

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 Khoj​

These are the general setup instructions for self-hosted Khoj. You can install the Khoj server using either Docker or Pip.

First Run

Restart your Khoj server after the first run to ensure all settings are applied correctly.

Prerequisites

Docker

brew install --cask docker  
brew install docker-compose

Setup

  1. Download the Khoj docker-compose.yml file from Github
mkdir ~/.khoj && cd ~/.khoj  
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/khoj-ai/khoj/master/docker-compose.yml
  1. Configure the environment variables in the docker-compose.yml
    • Set KHOJ_ADMIN_PASSWORD, KHOJ_DJANGO_SECRET_KEY (and optionally the KHOJ_ADMIN_EMAIL) to something secure. This allows you to customize Khoj later via the admin panel.
    • Set OPENAI_API_KEY, ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, or GEMINI_API_KEY to your API key if you want to use OpenAI, Anthropic or Gemini commercial chat models respectively.
    • Uncomment OPENAI_BASE_URL to use Ollama running on your host machine. Or set it to the URL of your OpenAI compatible API like vLLM or LMStudio.
  2. Start Khoj by running the following command in the same directory as your docker-compose.yml file.
cd ~/.khoj  
docker-compose up

Remote Access

By default Khoj is only accessible on the machine it is running. To access Khoj from a remote machine see Remote Access Docs.

Your setup is complete once you see 🌖 Khoj is ready to engage in the server logs on your terminal.

Use Khoj​

You can now open the web app at http://localhost:42110 and start interacting!
Nothing else is necessary, but you can customize your setup further by following the steps below.

Add Chat Models​

Login to the Khoj Admin Panel

Go to http://localhost:42110/server/admin and login with the admin credentials you setup during installation.

CSRF Error

Ensure you are using localhost, not 127.0.0.1, to access the admin panel to avoid the CSRF error.

CSRF Trusted Origin or Unset Cookie Error

If using a load balancer/reverse_proxy in front of your Khoj server: Set the environment variable KHOJ_ALLOWED_DOMAIN=your-internal-ip-or-domain to avoid this error. If unset, it defaults to KHOJ_DOMAIN.

DISALLOWED HOST or Bad Request (400) Error

You may hit this if you try access Khoj exposed on a custom domain (e.g. 192.168.12.3 or example.com) or over HTTP. Set the environment variables KHOJ_DOMAIN=your-external-ip-or-domain and KHOJ_NO_HTTPS=True if required to avoid this error.

Note

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

Configure Chat Model

Setup which chat model you'd want to use. Khoj supports local and online chat models.

Ollama Integration

Using Ollama? See the Ollama Integration section for more custom setup instructions.

  1. Create a new AI Model Api in the server admin settings.
    • Add your OpenAI API key
    • Give the configuration a friendly name like OpenAI
    • (Optional) Set the API base URL. It is only relevant if you're using another OpenAI-compatible proxy server like Ollama or LMStudio.
      example configuration for ai model api
  2. Create a new chat model
    • Set the chat-model field to an OpenAI chat model. Example: gpt-4o.
    • Make sure to set the model-type field to OpenAI.
    • If your model supports vision, set the vision enabled field to true. This is currently only supported for OpenAI models with vision capabilities.
    • 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.
      example configuration for chat model options

Multiple Chat Models

Set your preferred default chat model in the Default, Advanced fields of your ServerChatSettings. Khoj uses these chat model for all intermediate steps like intent detection, web search etc.

Chat Model Fields

Sync your Knowledge​

Setup Khoj Clients​

The Khoj web app is available by default to chat, search and configure Khoj.
You can also install a Khoj client to easily access it from Obsidian, Emacs, Whatsapp or your OS and keep your documents synced with Khoj.

Note

Set the host URL on your clients settings page to your Khoj server URL. By default, use http://127.0.0.1:42110 or http://localhost:42110. Note that localhost may not work in all cases.

Upgrade​

Upgrade Server​

pip install --upgrade khoj

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

Upgrade Clients​

Uninstall​

Uninstall Server​

# uninstall khoj server
pip uninstall khoj

# delete khoj postgres db
dropdb khoj -U postgres

Uninstall Clients​

Uninstall the Khoj Desktop client in the standard way from your OS.

Troubleshoot​

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

Install fails while building Tokenizer dependency​

brew install rustup  
rustup-init  
source ~/.cargo/env