Docker
Weaviate supports deployment with Docker.
You can run Weaviate with default settings from a command line, or customize your configuration by creating your own docker-compose.yml
file.
Run Weaviate with default settings
To run Weaviate with Docker using default settings, run this command from from your shell:
docker run -p 8080:8080 -p 50051:50051 cr.weaviate.io/semitechnologies/weaviate:1.28.0
The command sets the following default environment variables in the container:
PERSISTENCE_DATA_PATH
defaults to./data
AUTHENTICATION_ANONYMOUS_ACCESS_ENABLED
defaults totrue
.QUERY_DEFAULTS_LIMIT
defaults to10
.
Customize your Weaviate configuration
You can customize your Weaviate configuration by creating a docker-compose.yml
file. Start from our sample Docker Compose file, or use the interactive Configurator to generate a docker-compose.yml
file.
Sample Docker Compose file
This starter Docker Compose file allows:
- Use of any API-based model provider integrations (e.g.
OpenAI
,Cohere
,Google
, andAnthropic
).- This includes the relevant embedding model, generative, and reranker integrations.
- Searching pre-vectorized data (without a vectorizer).
- Mounts a persistent volume called
weaviate_data
to/var/lib/weaviate
in the container to store data.
Download and run
Save the text below as docker-compose.yml
:
---
services:
weaviate:
command:
- --host
- 0.0.0.0
- --port
- '8080'
- --scheme
- http
image: cr.weaviate.io/semitechnologies/weaviate:1.28.0
ports:
- 8080:8080
- 50051:50051
volumes:
- weaviate_data:/var/lib/weaviate
restart: on-failure:0
environment:
QUERY_DEFAULTS_LIMIT: 25
AUTHENTICATION_ANONYMOUS_ACCESS_ENABLED: 'true'
PERSISTENCE_DATA_PATH: '/var/lib/weaviate'
ENABLE_API_BASED_MODULES: 'true'
CLUSTER_HOSTNAME: 'node1'
volumes:
weaviate_data:
...
Edit the docker-compose.yml
file to suit your needs. You can add or remove environment variables, change the port mappings, or add additional model provider integrations, such as Ollama, or Hugging Face Transformers.
To start your Weaviate instance, run this command from your shell:
docker compose up -d
Configurator
The Configurator can generate a docker-compose.yml
file for you. Use the Configurator to select specific Weaviate modules, including vectorizers that run locally (i.e. text2vec-transformers
, or multi2vec-clip
)
Environment variables
You can use environment variables to control your Weaviate setup, authentication and authorization, module settings, and data storage settings.
A comprehensive of list environment variables can be found on this page.
Example configurations
Here are some examples of how to configure docker-compose.yml
.
Persistent volume
We recommended setting a persistent volume to avoid data loss as well as to improve reading and writing speeds.
Make sure to run docker compose down
when shutting down. This writes all the files from memory to disk.
With named volume
services:
weaviate:
volumes:
- weaviate_data:/var/lib/weaviate
# etc
volumes:
weaviate_data:
After running a docker compose up -d
, Docker will create a named volume weaviate_data
and mount it to the PERSISTENCE_DATA_PATH
inside the container.
With host binding
services:
weaviate:
volumes:
- /var/weaviate:/var/lib/weaviate
# etc
After running a docker compose up -d
, Docker will mount /var/weaviate
on the host to the PERSISTENCE_DATA_PATH
inside the container.
Weaviate without any modules
An example Docker Compose setup for Weaviate without any modules can be found below. In this case, no model inference is performed at either import or search time. You will need to provide your own vectors (e.g. from an outside ML model) at import and search time:
services:
weaviate:
image: cr.weaviate.io/semitechnologies/weaviate:1.28.0
ports:
- 8080:8080
- 50051:50051
restart: on-failure:0
environment:
QUERY_DEFAULTS_LIMIT: 25
AUTHENTICATION_ANONYMOUS_ACCESS_ENABLED: 'true'
PERSISTENCE_DATA_PATH: '/var/lib/weaviate'
CLUSTER_HOSTNAME: 'node1'
Weaviate with the text2vec-transformers
module
An example Docker Compose file with the transformers model sentence-transformers/multi-qa-MiniLM-L6-cos-v1
is:
services:
weaviate:
image: cr.weaviate.io/semitechnologies/weaviate:1.28.0
restart: on-failure:0
ports:
- 8080:8080
- 50051:50051
environment:
QUERY_DEFAULTS_LIMIT: 20
AUTHENTICATION_ANONYMOUS_ACCESS_ENABLED: 'true'
PERSISTENCE_DATA_PATH: "./data"
DEFAULT_VECTORIZER_MODULE: text2vec-transformers
ENABLE_MODULES: text2vec-transformers
TRANSFORMERS_INFERENCE_API: http://t2v-transformers:8080
CLUSTER_HOSTNAME: 'node1'
t2v-transformers:
image: cr.weaviate.io/semitechnologies/transformers-inference:sentence-transformers-multi-qa-MiniLM-L6-cos-v1
environment:
ENABLE_CUDA: 0 # set to 1 to enable
# NVIDIA_VISIBLE_DEVICES: all # enable if running with CUDA
Note that transformer models are neural networks built to run on GPUs. Running Weaviate with the text2vec-transformers
module and without GPU is possible, but it will be slower. Enable CUDA with ENABLE_CUDA=1
if you have a GPU available.
For more information on how to set up the environment with the
text2vec-transformers
integration, see this
page.
The text2vec-transformers
module requires at least Weaviate version v1.2.0
.
Unreleased versions
DISCLAIMER: Release candidate images and other unreleased software are not supported.
Unreleased software and images may contain bugs. APIs may change. Features under development may be withdrawn or modified. Do not use unreleased software in production.
To run an unreleased version of Weaviate, edit your configuration file to use the unreleased image instead of a generally available image. The GitHub releases page lists generally available and release candidate builds.
For example, to run a Docker image for a release candidate, edit your docker-config.yaml
to import the release candidate image.
image: cr.weaviate.io/semitechnologies/weaviate:1.23.0-rc.1
Multi-node configuration
To configure Weaviate to use multiple host nodes, follow these steps:
- Configure one node as a "founding" member
- Set the
CLUSTER_JOIN
variable for the other nodes in the cluster. - Set the
CLUSTER_GOSSIP_BIND_PORT
for each node. - Set the
CLUSTER_DATA_BIND_PORT
for each node. - Set the
RAFT_JOIN
each node. - Set the
RAFT_BOOTSTRAP_EXPECT
for each node with the number of voters. - Optionally, set the hostname for each node using
CLUSTER_HOSTNAME
.
(Read more about horizontal replication in Weaviate.)
So, the Docker Compose file includes environment variables for the "founding" member that look like this:
weaviate-node-1: # Founding member service name
... # truncated for brevity
environment:
CLUSTER_HOSTNAME: 'node1'
CLUSTER_GOSSIP_BIND_PORT: '7100'
CLUSTER_DATA_BIND_PORT: '7101'
RAFT_JOIN: 'node1,node2,node3'
RAFT_BOOTSTRAP_EXPECT: 3
And the other members' configurations may look like this:
weaviate-node-2:
... # truncated for brevity
environment:
CLUSTER_HOSTNAME: 'node2'
CLUSTER_GOSSIP_BIND_PORT: '7102'
CLUSTER_DATA_BIND_PORT: '7103'
CLUSTER_JOIN: 'weaviate-node-1:7100' # This must be the service name of the "founding" member node.
RAFT_JOIN: 'node1,node2,node3'
RAFT_BOOTSTRAP_EXPECT: 3
Below is an example configuration for a 3-node setup. You may be able to test replication examples locally using this configuration.
Docker Compose file for a replication setup with 3 nodes
services:
weaviate-node-1:
init: true
command:
- --host
- 0.0.0.0
- --port
- '8080'
- --scheme
- http
image: cr.weaviate.io/semitechnologies/weaviate:1.28.0
ports:
- 8080:8080
- 6060:6060
- 50051:50051
restart: on-failure:0
volumes:
- ./data-node-1:/var/lib/weaviate
environment:
LOG_LEVEL: 'debug'
QUERY_DEFAULTS_LIMIT: 25
AUTHENTICATION_ANONYMOUS_ACCESS_ENABLED: 'true'
PERSISTENCE_DATA_PATH: '/var/lib/weaviate'
ENABLE_API_BASED_MODULES: 'true'
CLUSTER_HOSTNAME: 'node1'
CLUSTER_GOSSIP_BIND_PORT: '7100'
CLUSTER_DATA_BIND_PORT: '7101'
RAFT_JOIN: 'node1,node2,node3'
RAFT_BOOTSTRAP_EXPECT: 3
weaviate-node-2:
init: true
command:
- --host
- 0.0.0.0
- --port
- '8080'
- --scheme
- http
image: cr.weaviate.io/semitechnologies/weaviate:1.28.0
ports:
- 8081:8080
- 6061:6060
- 50052:50051
restart: on-failure:0
volumes:
- ./data-node-2:/var/lib/weaviate
environment:
LOG_LEVEL: 'debug'
QUERY_DEFAULTS_LIMIT: 25
AUTHENTICATION_ANONYMOUS_ACCESS_ENABLED: 'true'
PERSISTENCE_DATA_PATH: '/var/lib/weaviate'
ENABLE_API_BASED_MODULES: 'true'
CLUSTER_HOSTNAME: 'node2'
CLUSTER_GOSSIP_BIND_PORT: '7102'
CLUSTER_DATA_BIND_PORT: '7103'
CLUSTER_JOIN: 'weaviate-node-1:7100'
RAFT_JOIN: 'node1,node2,node3'
RAFT_BOOTSTRAP_EXPECT: 3
weaviate-node-3:
init: true
command:
- --host
- 0.0.0.0
- --port
- '8080'
- --scheme
- http
image: cr.weaviate.io/semitechnologies/weaviate:1.28.0
ports:
- 8082:8080
- 6062:6060
- 50053:50051
restart: on-failure:0
volumes:
- ./data-node-3:/var/lib/weaviate
environment:
LOG_LEVEL: 'debug'
QUERY_DEFAULTS_LIMIT: 25
AUTHENTICATION_ANONYMOUS_ACCESS_ENABLED: 'true'
PERSISTENCE_DATA_PATH: '/var/lib/weaviate'
ENABLE_API_BASED_MODULES: 'true'
CLUSTER_HOSTNAME: 'node3'
CLUSTER_GOSSIP_BIND_PORT: '7104'
CLUSTER_DATA_BIND_PORT: '7105'
CLUSTER_JOIN: 'weaviate-node-1:7100'
RAFT_JOIN: 'node1,node2,node3'
RAFT_BOOTSTRAP_EXPECT: 3
It is a Weaviate convention to set the CLUSTER_DATA_BIND_PORT
to 1 higher than CLUSTER_GOSSIP_BIND_PORT
.
Shell attachment options
The output of docker compose up
is quite verbose as it attaches to the logs of all containers.
You can attach the logs only to Weaviate itself, for example, by running the following command instead of docker compose up
:
# Run Docker Compose
docker compose up -d && docker compose logs -f weaviate
Alternatively you can run docker compose entirely detached with docker compose up -d
and then poll {bindaddress}:{port}/v1/meta
until you receive a status 200 OK
.
Troubleshooting
Set CLUSTER_HOSTNAME
if it may change over time
In some systems, the cluster hostname may change over time. This is known to create issues with a single-node Weaviate deployment. To avoid this, set the CLUSTER_HOSTNAME
environment variable in the values.yaml
file to the cluster hostname.
---
services:
weaviate:
# ...
environment:
CLUSTER_HOSTNAME: 'node1'
...
Related pages
- If you are new to Docker, see Docker Introduction for Weaviate Users.
Questions and feedback
If you have any questions or feedback, let us know in the user forum.