Docker Compose

     

Configurator

You can use the configuration tool below to customize your Weaviate setup for your desired runtime.

Example configurations

note

If you are new to Docker (Compose) and containerization, check out our Docker Introduction for Weaviate Users.

To start Weaviate with docker-compose, you need a docker-compose configuration file, typically called docker-compose.yml. You can obtain it from the configuration tool above or alternatively pick one of the examples below. Additional environment variables can be set in this file, which control your Weaviate setup, authentication and authorization, module settings, and data storage settings.

List of environment variables

A comprehensive of list environment variables can be found on this page.

Persistent volume

It's recommended to set a persistent volume to avoid data loss and improve reading and writing speeds.

Add the following snippet to your Docker Compose YAML file:

services:
  weaviate:
    volumes:
      - /var/weaviate:/var/lib/weaviate
    # etc

Make sure to run $ docker-compose down when shutting down, this writes all the files from memory to disk.

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:

version: '3.4'
services:
  weaviate:
    image: semitechnologies/weaviate:1.19.6
    ports:
    - 8080:8080
    restart: on-failure:0
    environment:
      QUERY_DEFAULTS_LIMIT: 25
      AUTHENTICATION_ANONYMOUS_ACCESS_ENABLED: 'true'
      PERSISTENCE_DATA_PATH: '/var/lib/weaviate'
      DEFAULT_VECTORIZER_MODULE: 'none'
      CLUSTER_HOSTNAME: 'node1'

Weaviate with the text2vec-transformers module

An example docker-compose setup file with the transformers model sentence-transformers/multi-qa-MiniLM-L6-cos-v1 is:

version: '3.4'
services:
  weaviate:
    image: semitechnologies/weaviate:1.19.6
    restart: on-failure:0
    ports:
     - "8080:8080"
    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: 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 if you have a GPU available (ENABLE_CUDA=1).

For more information on how to set up the environment with the text2vec-transformers module, see this page.

The text2vec-transformers module requires at least Weaviate version v1.2.0.

Multi-node setup

You can create a multi-node setup with Weaviate using Docker-Compose. To do so, you need to:

• Set up one node as a "founding" member, and configure the other nodes in the cluster to join it using the CLUSTER_JOIN variable.
• Configure CLUSTER_GOSSIP_BIND_PORT and CLUSTER_DATA_BIND_PORT for each node.
• Optionally, you can set the hostname for each node using CLUSTER_HOSTNAME.

So, the configuration file will include environment variables for the "founding" member that looks like the below:

  weaviate-node-1:  # Founding member service name
    ...  # truncated for brevity
    environment:
      CLUSTER_HOSTNAME: 'node1'
      CLUSTER_GOSSIP_BIND_PORT: '7100'
      CLUSTER_DATA_BIND_PORT: '7101'

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.

We provide an example docker-compose.yml below:

An example multi-node Docker-Compose file

services:
  weaviate-node-1:
    init: true
    command:
    - --host
    - 0.0.0.0
    - --port
    - '8080'
    - --scheme
    - http
    image: semitechnologies/weaviate:1.19.6
    ports:
    - 8080:8080
    - 6060:6060
    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'
      DEFAULT_VECTORIZER_MODULE: 'none'
      CLUSTER_HOSTNAME: 'node1'
      CLUSTER_GOSSIP_BIND_PORT: '7100'
      CLUSTER_DATA_BIND_PORT: '7101'

  weaviate-node-2:
    init: true
    command:
    - --host
    - 0.0.0.0
    - --port
    - '8080'
    - --scheme
    - http
    image: semitechnologies/weaviate:1.19.6
    ports:
    - 8081:8080
    - 6061:6060
    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'
      DEFAULT_VECTORIZER_MODULE: 'none'
      CLUSTER_HOSTNAME: 'node2'
      CLUSTER_GOSSIP_BIND_PORT: '7102'
      CLUSTER_DATA_BIND_PORT: '7103'
      CLUSTER_JOIN: 'weaviate-node-1:7100'

Port number conventions

It is a Weaviate convention to set the CLUSTER_DATA_BIND_PORT to 1 higher than CLUSTER_GOSSIP_BIND_PORT.

Read more about horizontal replication in Weaviate.

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.

More Resources

If you can't find the answer to your question here, please look at the:

1. Frequently Asked Questions. Or,
2. Knowledge base of old issues. Or,
3. For questions: Stackoverflow. Or,
4. For more involved discussion: Weaviate Community Forum. Or,
5. We also have a Slack channel.