Easy RAG: the easiest way to get started with Retrieval Augmented Generation

The Quarkus LangChain4j project provides a separate extension named quarkus-langchain4j-easy-rag which provides an extremely easy way to get a RAG pipeline up and running. After adding this extension to your application, all that is needed to ingest documents into an embedding store is to add a dependency that provides an embedding model, and provide a single configuration property, quarkus.langchain4j.easy-rag.path, which denotes a path in the local filesystem where your documents are stored. On startup, Quarkus will automatically scan all files in the directory and ingest them into an in-memory embedding store.

Apache Tika, a library for parsing various file formats, is used under the hood, so your documents can be in any of its supported formats (plain text, PDF, DOCX, HTML, etc), including images with text, which will be parsed using OCR (OCR requires to have the Tesseract library installed in your system - see https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/TIKA/TikaOCR).

You also don’t even need to add a persistent embedding store - the quarkus-langchain4j-easy-rag extension will automatically register a simple in-memory store for you if no other store is detected. You also don’t have to provide an implementation of RetrievalAugmentor, a basic default instance will be generated for you and wired to the in-memory store.

An in-memory embedding store is OK for very simple use cases and getting started quickly, but is extremely limited in terms of scalability, and the data in it is not stored persistently. When using Easy RAG, it is still possible to use a persistent embedding store, such as Redis, by adding the relevant extension (like quarkus-langchain4j-redis) to your application.

You have to add an extension that provides an embedding model. For that, you can choose from the plethora of extensions like quarkus-langchain4j-openai, quarkus-langchain4j-ollama, or import an in-process embedding model - these have the advantage of not having to send data over the wire.

If you add two or more artifacts that provide embedding models, Quarkus will ask you to choose one of them using the quarkus.langchain4j.embedding-model.provider property.

Reusing embeddings

You might find that when doing local development that computing embeddings takes some time. This pain can often be felt in dev mode when it may take several minutes between restarts.

That’s where reusable ingestions come in! If you don’t configure a persistent embedding store and set

quarkus.langchain4j.easy-rag.reuse-embeddings.enabled=true

then the easy-rag extension will detect the local embeddings. If they exist then they are loaded into the embedding store. If they don’t exist, they are computed as normal and then written out to the file easy-rag-embeddings.json in the current directory.

You can customize the embeddings file by setting the quarkus.langchain4j.easy-rag.reuse-embeddings.file property.

See this diagram which describes the flow:

easy rag reuse embeddings
Figure 1. Reusable ingestion flow

Getting started with a ready-to-use example

To see Easy RAG in action, use the project samples/chatbot-easy-rag in the quarkus-langchain4j repository. Simply clone the repository, navigate to samples/chatbot-easy-rag, declare the QUARKUS_LANGCHAIN4J_OPENAI_API_KEY environment variable containing your OpenAI API key and then start the project using mvn quarkus:dev. When the application starts, navigate to localhost:8080 and ask any questions that the bot can answer (look into the files in samples/chatbot-easy-rag/src/main/resources/documents to see what documents the bot has ingested). For example, ask:

What are the benefits of a standard savings account?
This application contains an HTML+JavaScript based UI. But with Quarkus dev mode, it is possible to try out RAG even without having to write a frontend. If the application is in dev mode, simply open the Dev UI (http://localhost:8080/q/dev-ui) and click the 'Chat' button inside the LangChain4j card. A built-in UI for chatting will appear, and it will make use of the RAG pipeline created by the Easy RAG extension. More information about Dev UI features is on the Dev UI page.

To control the parameters of the document splitter that ingests documents at startup, use the following properties:

  • quarkus.langchain4j.easy-rag.max-segment-size: The maximum length of a single document, in tokens. Default is 300.

  • quarkus.langchain4j.easy-rag.max-overlap-size: The overlap between adjacent documents. Default is 30.

To control the number of retrieved documents, use quarkus.langchain4j.easy-rag.max-results. The default is 5.

To control the path matcher denoting which files to ingest, use quarkus.langchain4j.easy-rag.path-matcher. The default is glob:**, meaning all files recursively.

For finer-grained control of the Apache Tika parsers (for example, to turn off OCR capabilities), you can use a regular XML config file recognized by Tika (see Tika documentation), and specify -Dtika.config to point at the file.

Configuration

Several configuration properties are available:

Configuration property fixed at build time - All other configuration properties are overridable at runtime

Configuration property

Type

Default

quarkus.langchain4j.easy-rag.path

Path to the directory containing the documents to be ingested.

Environment variable: QUARKUS_LANGCHAIN4J_EASY_RAG_PATH

string

required

quarkus.langchain4j.easy-rag.path-matcher

Matcher used for filtering which files from the directory should be ingested. This uses the java.nio.file.FileSystem path matcher syntax. Example: glob:**.txt to recursively match all files with the .txt extension. The default is glob:**, recursively matching all files.

Environment variable: QUARKUS_LANGCHAIN4J_EASY_RAG_PATH_MATCHER

string

glob:**

quarkus.langchain4j.easy-rag.recursive

Whether to recursively ingest documents from subdirectories.

Environment variable: QUARKUS_LANGCHAIN4J_EASY_RAG_RECURSIVE

boolean

true

quarkus.langchain4j.easy-rag.max-segment-size

Maximum segment size when splitting documents, in tokens.

Environment variable: QUARKUS_LANGCHAIN4J_EASY_RAG_MAX_SEGMENT_SIZE

int

300

quarkus.langchain4j.easy-rag.max-overlap-size

Maximum overlap (in tokens) when splitting documents.

Environment variable: QUARKUS_LANGCHAIN4J_EASY_RAG_MAX_OVERLAP_SIZE

int

30

quarkus.langchain4j.easy-rag.max-results

Maximum number of results to return when querying the retrieval augmentor.

Environment variable: QUARKUS_LANGCHAIN4J_EASY_RAG_MAX_RESULTS

int

5

quarkus.langchain4j.easy-rag.ingestion-strategy

The strategy to decide whether document ingestion into the store should happen at startup or not. The default is ON. Changing to OFF generally only makes sense if running against a persistent embedding store that was already populated.

Environment variable: QUARKUS_LANGCHAIN4J_EASY_RAG_INGESTION_STRATEGY

on, off

on

quarkus.langchain4j.easy-rag.reuse-embeddings.enabled

Whether or not to reuse embeddings. Defaults to false.

Environment variable: QUARKUS_LANGCHAIN4J_EASY_RAG_REUSE_EMBEDDINGS_ENABLED

boolean

false

quarkus.langchain4j.easy-rag.reuse-embeddings.file

The file path to load/save embeddings, assuming quarkus.langchain4j.easy-rag.reuse-embeddings.enabled == true.

Defaults to easy-rag-embeddings.json in the current directory.

Environment variable: QUARKUS_LANGCHAIN4J_EASY_RAG_REUSE_EMBEDDINGS_FILE

string

easy-rag-embeddings.json