Containerize a RAG application

Table of contents

Overview

This section walks you through containerizing a RAG application using Docker.

Note

You can see more samples of containerized GenAI applications in the GenAI Stack demo applications.

The sample application used in this guide is an example of RAG application, made by three main components, which are the building blocks for every RAG application. A Large Language Model hosted somewhere, in this case it is hosted in a container and served via Ollama. A vector database, Qdrant, to store the embeddings of local data, and a web application, using Streamlit to offer the best user experience to the user.

Clone the sample application. Open a terminal, change directory to a directory that you want to work in, and run the following command to clone the repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/mfranzon/winy.git

You should now have the following files in your winy directory.

├── winy/
│ ├── .gitignore
│ ├── app/
│ │ ├── main.py
│ │ ├── Dockerfile
| | └── requirements.txt
│ ├── tools/
│ │ ├── create_db.py
│ │ ├── create_embeddings.py
│ │ ├── requirements.txt
│ │ ├── test.py
| | └── download_model.sh
│ ├── docker-compose.yaml
│ ├── wine_database.db
│ ├── LICENSE
│ └── README.md

Containerizing your application: Essentials

Containerizing an application involves packaging it along with its dependencies into a container, which ensures consistency across different environments. Here’s what you need to containerize an app like Winy :

Dockerfile: A Dockerfile that contains instructions on how to build a Docker image for your application. It specifies the base image, dependencies, configuration files, and the command to run your application.
Docker Compose File: Docker Compose is a tool for defining and running multi-container Docker applications. A Compose file allows you to configure your application's services, networks, and volumes in a single file.

Run the application

Inside the winy directory, run the following command in a terminal.

$ docker compose up --build

Docker builds and runs your application. Depending on your network connection, it may take several minutes to download all the dependencies. You'll see a message like the following in the terminal when the application is running.

server-1  |   You can now view your Streamlit app in your browser.
server-1  |
server-1  |   URL: http://0.0.0.0:8501
server-1  |

Open a browser and view the application at http://localhost:8501. You should see a simple Streamlit application.

The application requires a Qdrant database service and an LLM service to work properly. If you have access to services that you ran outside of Docker, specify the connection information in the docker-compose.yaml.

winy:
  build:
    context: ./app
    dockerfile: Dockerfile
  environment:
    - QDRANT_CLIENT=http://qdrant:6333 # Specifies the url for the qdrant database
    - OLLAMA=http://ollama:11434 # Specifies the url for the ollama service
  container_name: winy
  ports:
    - "8501:8501"
  depends_on:
    - qdrant
    - ollama

If you don't have the services running, continue with this guide to learn how you can run some or all of these services with Docker. Remember that the ollama service is empty; it doesn't have any model. For this reason you need to pull a model before starting to use the RAG application. All the instructions are in the following page.

In the terminal, press ctrl+c to stop the application.

Summary

In this section, you learned how you can containerize and run your RAG application using Docker.

Next steps

In the next section, you'll learn how to properly configure the application with your preferred LLM model, completely locally, using Docker.

Develop your application