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Modules

Weaviate's functionality can be customized by using modules. This page explains how to enable and configure modules.

Instance-level configuration​

At the instance (i.e. Weaviate cluster) level, you can:

  • Enable modules
  • Configure the default vectorizer module
  • Configure module-specific variables (e.g. API keys), where applicable

This can be done by setting the appropriate environment variables as shown below.

What about WCD?

Weaviate Cloud (WCD) instances come with modules pre-configured. See this page for details.

Enable individual modules​

You can enable modules by specifying the list of modules in the ENABLE_MODULES variable. For example, this code enables the text2vec-transformers module.

services:
  weaviate:
    environment:
      ENABLE_MODULES: 'text2vec-transformers'

To enable multiple modules, add them in a comma-separated list.

This example code enables the 'text2vec-huggingface, generative-cohere, and qna-openai modules.

services:
  weaviate:
    environment:
      ENABLE_MODULES: 'text2vec-huggingface,generative-cohere,qna-openai'

Enable all API-based modules​

Experimental feature

Available starting in v1.26.0. This is an experimental feature. Use with caution.

You can enable all API-based modules by setting the ENABLE_API_BASED_MODULES variable to true. This will enable all API-based model integrations, such as those for Anthropic, Cohere, OpenAI and so on by enabling the relevant modules. These modules are lightweight, so enabling them all will not significantly increase resource usage.

services:
  weaviate:
    environment:
      ENABLE_API_BASED_MODULES: 'true'

The list of API-based modules can be found on the model provider integrations page. You can also inspect the source code where the list is defined.

This can be combined with enabling individual modules. For example, the example below enables all API-based modules, Ollama modules and the backup-s3 module.

services:
  weaviate:
    environment:
      ENABLE_API_BASED_MODULES: 'true'
      ENABLE_MODULES: 'text2vec-ollama,generative-ollama,backup-s3'

Note that enabling multiple vectorizer (e.g. text2vec, multi2vec) modules will disable the Explore functionality. If you need to use Explore, you should only enable one vectorizer module.

Module-specific variables​

You may need to specify additional environment variables to configure each module where applicable. For example, the backup-s3 module requires the backup S3 bucket to be set via BACKUP_S3_BUCKET, and the text2vec-contextionary module requires the inference API location via TRANSFORMERS_INFERENCE_API.

Refer to the individual module documentation for more details.

Vectorizer modules​

The vectorization integration enable Weaviate to vectorize data at import, and to perform near<Media> searches such as nearText or nearImage.

List of available vectorizer integrations

Can be found in this section.

Enable vectorizer modules​

You can enable vectorizer modules by adding them to the ENABLE_MODULES environment variable. For example, this code enables the text2vec-cohere, text2vec-huggingface, and text2vec-openai vectorizer modules.

services:
  weaviate:
    environment:
      ENABLE_MODULES: 'text2vec-cohere,text2vec-huggingface,text2vec-openai'

Default vectorizer module​

You can specify a default vectorization module with the DEFAULT_VECTORIZER_MODULE variable as below.

If a default vectorizer module is not set, you must set a vectorizer in the schema before you can use near<Media> or vectorization at import time.

This code sets text2vec-huggingface as the default vectorizer. Thus, text2vec-huggingface module will be used unless another vectorizer is specified for that class.

services:
  weaviate:
    environment:
      DEFAULT_VECTORIZER_MODULE: text2vec-huggingface

Generative model integrations​

The generative model integrations enable retrieval augmented generation functions.

Enable a generative module​

You can enable generative modules by adding the desired module to the ENABLE_MODULES environment variable. For example, this code enables the generative-cohere module and the text2vec-huggingface vectorizer module.

services:
  weaviate:
    environment:
      ENABLE_MODULES: 'text2vec-huggingface,generative-cohere'
generative module selection unrelated to text2vec module selection

Your choice of the text2vec module does not restrict your choice of generative module, or vice versa.

Tenant offload modules​

Tenants can be offloaded to cold storage to reduce memory and disk usage, and onloaded back when needed.

See the dedicated page on tenant offloading for more information on how to configure Weaviate for tenant offloading. For information on how to offload and onload tenants, see How-to: manage tenant states.

Custom modules​

See here how you can create and use your own modules.

Questions and feedback​

If you have any questions or feedback, let us know in the user forum.