Installation#

PIP#

Lilac is published on pip under lilac. You can install it with:

pip install lilac[all]

Note

To skip optional dependencies, run pip install lilac instead. You will have to manually install any dependencies. For example to install GTE embedding, do pip install lilac[gte].

Docker#

Docker Hub#

We publish images for linux/amd64 and linux/arm64 on Docker Hub under lilacai.

The container runs on the virtual port 80, this command maps it to the host machine port 5432.

If you have an existing lilac project, mount it and set the LILAC_PROJECT_DIR environment variable:

docker run -it \
  -p 5432:80 \
  --volume /host/path/to/data:/data \
  -e LILAC_PROJECT_DIR="/data" \
  --gpus all \ # Remove if you don't have a GPU, or on MacOS.
  lilacai/lilac

Your own image#

To build your own custom image, fork our Dockerfile, or build it from the root of the repository:

docker build -t lilac .

Test the installation#

To make sure the installation works, start a new lilac project:

Note

If this is a fresh virtual env, it might take a dozen seconds to see the initial output.

 lilac start ~/my_project
Lilac will create a project in `/Users/me/my-project`. Do you want to continue? (y/n): y

INFO:     Started server process [33100]
INFO:     Waiting for application startup.
INFO:     Application startup complete.
INFO:     Uvicorn running on http://127.0.0.1:5432 (Press CTRL+C to quit)

This should start a web server at http://localhost:5432.

To check the current version:

lilac version

Environment setup#

To use hosted services for computing embeddings, add the following environment variables:

  • OPENAI_API_KEY: OpenAI API key. You can get one here.

  • COHERE_API_KEY: Cohere API key. You can get one here.