WCS Quickstart

Overview

Welcome to the Quickstart guide for Weaviate Cloud Services (WCS). Here, you will learn:

• How to set up a Weaviate instance on WCS, and
• How to instantiate a Weaviate client to communicate with the WCS instance.

Agenda

By the end of this tutorial, you will be familiar with the basics of WCS. You will have:

• Created a WCS account,
• Created a new free WCS sandbox instance without authentication,
• Installed a Weaviate client of your choice, and
• Queried your new WCS sandbox instance with the Weaviate client.

And if you wish, you will be ready to move onto our Weaviate Quickstart tutorial next.

Sign in to WCS

1. First, access WCS by navigating to the Weaviate Cloud Console, and click on "Sign in with the Weaviate Cloud Services".
   1. If you don't have an account with WCS yet, click on the "Register" button and create a new account.
2. Then, sign in with your WCS username and password.

Create a Weaviate Cluster

To create a new Weaviate Cluster, click the "Create cluster" button.

Then:

1. Select the Free sandbox plan tier.
2. Provide a cluster name, which will become a part of its URL. A suffix will be added to this to ensure uniqueness.
3. Set the Enable Authentication? option to NO.

Your selections should look like this:

Finally, press Create to create your sandbox instance. Note that the sandbox will expire after a set number of days.

This will start the process to create a new instance, and you will see a progress indicator.

Instance creation should take a minute or two, and you will see a tick ✔️ when it's done, indicating that the instance is ready.

Sandbox expiry & options

Sandbox expiry

The sandbox is free, but it will expire after 14 days. After this time, all data in the sandbox will be deleted.

If you would like to preserve your sandbox data, you can retrieve your data with our cursor API, or contact us to upgrade to a production SaaS instance.

In the meantime, let's start installing a client library.

Install a client library

You can communicate with Weaviate using the available client libraries (currently for Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Java and Go), the GraphQL API, or the RESTful API.

With these clients you can perform all RESTful and GraphQL requests. This means you can use any endpoint, and perform all GraphQL queries directly from your Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, Java or Go scripts.

The Weaviate documentation, including the RESTful API and GraphQL reference pages, include code snippets using each client. The methods of the clients are designed to reflect the API functions 1:1, but are designed (structured and named) in the way native to the language.

Install your preferred client by following the relevant instructions below:

Python

Add weaviate-client to your Python environment with pip:

$ pip install weaviate-client

TypeScript

Add weaviate-ts-client to your project with npm:

npm install weaviate-ts-client

Go

Add weaviate-go-client to your project with go get:

go get github.com/semi-technologies/weaviate-go-client/v4

Java

Add this dependency to your project:

<dependency>
  <groupId>io.weaviate</groupId>
  <artifactId>client</artifactId>
  <version>4.0.0</version>  <!-- Check latest version -->
</dependency>

Connect to your WCS instance

By now, you should have:

• Set up a sandbox instance of Weaviate on WCS, and
• Installed a Weaviate client library.

Let's put the pieces together by connecting to the Weaviate instance and retrieving the existing schema, which should be empty.

This can be done by sending a request to the schema endpoint.

Authentication

If you have enabled authentication in your sandbox for added security, this step will require that you pass on the authentication credentials. Please see the authentication guide for how.

Run the below code for your preferred client, replacing the endpoint address with your own:

Where to get the instance URL

You can get the URL for your WCS instance from the WCS dashboard, once you've logged in and the instance creation is complete. Click through to see the detail on your cluster, and you'll see the URL there.

Python

import weaviate

client = weaviate.Client(
    url="https://some-endpoint.weaviate.network/",  # Replace with your endpoint
)

client.schema.get()

JavaScript

const { default: weaviate } = require('weaviate-ts-client');

const client = weaviate.client({
  scheme: 'https',
  host: 'some-endpoint.weaviate.network',  // Replace with your endpoint
});

client
  .schema
  .getter()
  .do()
  .then(res => {
  console.log(res);
  })
  .catch(err => {
  console.error(err)
  });

TypeScript

import weaviate, { WeaviateClient } from 'weaviate-ts-client';

const client: WeaviateClient = weaviate.client({
  scheme: 'https',
  host: 'some-endpoint.weaviate.network',  // Replace with your endpoint
});

client
  .schema
  .getter()
  .do()
  .then((res: any) => {
  console.log(res);
  })
  .catch((err: Error) => {
  console.error(err)
  });

Go

package main

import (
    "context"
    "fmt"
    "github.com/weaviate/weaviate-go-client/v4/weaviate"
)

func main() {
    cfg := weaviate.Config{
        Host:   "some-endpoint.weaviate.network/",  // Replace with your endpoint
        Scheme: "https",
    }

    client, err := weaviate.NewClient(cfg)
    if err != nil {
      panic(err)
    }

    schema, err := client.Schema().Getter().Do(context.Background())
    if err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }
    fmt.Printf("%+v", schema)
}

Java

package io.weaviate;

import io.weaviate.client.Config;
import io.weaviate.client.WeaviateClient;
import io.weaviate.client.base.Result;
import io.weaviate.client.v1.misc.model.Meta;

public class App {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    Config config = new Config("https", "some-endpoint.weaviate.network/");  // Replace with your endpoint

    WeaviateClient client = new WeaviateClient(config);

    // get the schema
    Result<Schema> result = client.schema().getter().run();
    if (result.hasErrors()) {
        System.out.println(result.getError());
        return;
    }

    // print the schema
    System.out.println(result.getResult());
  }
}

Curl

curl https://some-endpoint.weaviate.network/v1/schema

You should receive a response confirming the instance to be empty.

{'classes': []}

Congratulations! You have successfully set up a cloud-based vector database with WCS.

Next

Now that you are set up with a WCS instance:

• If you are new to Weaviate at large, we recommend moving to the Weaviate Quickstart Tutorial.
• Otherwise, we hope you enjoy your experience with WCS.

More resources

Is something broken?

We want you to have the best experience possible here. So if you find that something here doesn't work, or doesn't make sense, please let us know! You can:

• File an issue on GitHub, or
• Talk to us on the community forum, or
• Ping us on Slack

Support & Troubleshooting

All Weaviate users are welcome to join our community Slack and forum.

Additionally, paid customers can also contact support via channels provided during cluster creation and/or on-boarding.

For general contact details please see this page.

Inference API status pages

• Cohere status
• Hugging Face status
• OpenAI status