Installation

What this page covers

The requirements for the supported Docker Compose path and what is optional for the CLI, local development, and backups.

Docker Compose requirements

The recommended deployment needs:

• Git, Docker, and Docker Compose.
• A reachable embedding provider: Ollama for local embeddings, or OpenAI for hosted embeddings. Search requires that provider; there is no BM25-only fallback when embeddings are unavailable.

Docker users do not need to run npm install on the host. On its first start, the default Compose setup generates and persists PostgreSQL and Admin installation secrets. It does not require cp .env.example .env.

Choose the provider before the first start:

• For local embeddings, install and start Ollama on the Docker host, then run ollama pull bge-m3.
• For hosted OpenAI embeddings, create a .env containing your actual OPENAI_API_KEY before Compose starts. Do not use a sample or placeholder key as configuration.

Ollama can also provide optional LLM extraction; extraction is separate from embeddings and is disabled by default.

Optional local tools

• Node.js 22+ is for the published pgm CLI or local development, not Docker startup.
• gpg is only required for encrypted CLI backups.
• An Anthropic API key is optional when you choose Anthropic for extraction.

Next step

Continue to Quick Start for the clone command, provider selection, Admin onboarding, and a verified first write and search.