title: chat-ui
emoji: 🔥
colorFrom: purple
colorTo: purple
sdk: docker
pinned: false
license: apache-2.0
base_path: /chat
app_port: 3000
Chat UI
A chat interface using open source models, eg OpenAssistant or Llama. It is a SvelteKit app and it powers the HuggingChat app on hf.co/chat.
- No Setup Deploy
- Setup
- Launch
- Web Search
- Text Embedding Models
- Extra parameters
- Deploying to a HF Space
- Building
No Setup Deploy
If you don't want to configure, setup, and launch your own Chat UI yourself, you can use this option as a fast deploy alternative.
You can deploy your own customized Chat UI instance with any supported LLM of your choice on Hugging Face Spaces. To do so, use the chat-ui template available here.
Set HF_TOKEN
in Space secrets to deploy a model with gated access or a model in a private repository. It's also compatible with Inference for PROs curated list of powerful models with higher rate limits. Make sure to create your personal token first in your User Access Tokens settings.
Read the full tutorial here.
Setup
The default config for Chat UI is stored in the .env
file. You will need to override some values to get Chat UI to run locally. This is done in .env.local
.
Start by creating a .env.local
file in the root of the repository. The bare minimum config you need to get Chat UI to run locally is the following:
MONGODB_URL=<the URL to your MongoDB instance>
HF_TOKEN=<your access token>
Database
The chat history is stored in a MongoDB instance, and having a DB instance available is needed for Chat UI to work.
You can use a local MongoDB instance. The easiest way is to spin one up using docker:
docker run -d -p 27017:27017 --name mongo-chatui mongo:latest
In which case the url of your DB will be MONGODB_URL=mongodb://localhost:27017
.
Alternatively, you can use a free MongoDB Atlas instance for this, Chat UI should fit comfortably within their free tier. After which you can set the MONGODB_URL
variable in .env.local
to match your instance.
Hugging Face Access Token
If you use a remote inference endpoint, you will need a Hugging Face access token to run Chat UI locally. You can get one from your Hugging Face profile.
Launch
After you're done with the .env.local
file you can run Chat UI locally with:
npm install
npm run dev
Web Search
Chat UI features a powerful Web Search feature. It works by:
- Generating an appropriate search query from the user prompt.
- Performing web search and extracting content from webpages.
- Creating embeddings from texts using a text embedding model.
- From these embeddings, find the ones that are closest to the user query using a vector similarity search. Specifically, we use
inner product
distance. - Get the corresponding texts to those closest embeddings and perform Retrieval-Augmented Generation (i.e. expand user prompt by adding those texts so that an LLM can use this information).
Text Embedding Models
By default (for backward compatibility), when TEXT_EMBEDDING_MODELS
environment variable is not defined, transformers.js embedding models will be used for embedding tasks, specifically, Xenova/gte-small model.
You can customize the embedding model by setting TEXT_EMBEDDING_MODELS
in your .env.local
file. For example:
TEXT_EMBEDDING_MODELS = `[
{
"name": "Xenova/gte-small",
"displayName": "Xenova/gte-small",
"description": "locally running embedding",
"chunkCharLength": 512,
"endpoints": [
{"type": "transformersjs"}
]
},
{
"name": "intfloat/e5-base-v2",
"displayName": "intfloat/e5-base-v2",
"description": "hosted embedding model",
"chunkCharLength": 768,
"preQuery": "query: ", # See https://huggingface.co/intfloat/e5-base-v2#faq
"prePassage": "passage: ", # See https://huggingface.co/intfloat/e5-base-v2#faq
"endpoints": [
{
"type": "tei",
"url": "http://127.0.0.1:8080/",
"authorization": "TOKEN_TYPE TOKEN" // optional authorization field. Example: "Basic VVNFUjpQQVNT"
}
]
}
]`
The required fields are name
, chunkCharLength
and endpoints
.
Supported text embedding backends are: transformers.js
and TEI
. transformers.js
models run locally as part of chat-ui
, whereas TEI
models run in a different environment & accessed through an API endpoint.
When more than one embedding models are supplied in .env.local
file, the first will be used by default, and the others will only be used on LLM's which configured embeddingModel
to the name of the model.
Extra parameters
OpenID connect
The login feature is disabled by default and users are attributed a unique ID based on their browser. But if you want to use OpenID to authenticate your users, you can add the following to your .env.local
file:
OPENID_CONFIG=`{
PROVIDER_URL: "<your OIDC issuer>",
CLIENT_ID: "<your OIDC client ID>",
CLIENT_SECRET: "<your OIDC client secret>",
SCOPES: "openid profile",
TOLERANCE: // optional
RESOURCE: // optional
}`
These variables will enable the openID sign-in modal for users.
Theming
You can use a few environment variables to customize the look and feel of chat-ui. These are by default:
PUBLIC_APP_NAME=ChatUI
PUBLIC_APP_ASSETS=chatui
PUBLIC_APP_COLOR=blue
PUBLIC_APP_DESCRIPTION="Making the community's best AI chat models available to everyone."
PUBLIC_APP_DATA_SHARING=
PUBLIC_APP_DISCLAIMER=
PUBLIC_APP_NAME
The name used as a title throughout the app.PUBLIC_APP_ASSETS
Is used to find logos & favicons instatic/$PUBLIC_APP_ASSETS
, current options arechatui
andhuggingchat
.PUBLIC_APP_COLOR
Can be any of the tailwind colors.PUBLIC_APP_DATA_SHARING
Can be set to 1 to add a toggle in the user settings that lets your users opt-in to data sharing with models creator.PUBLIC_APP_DISCLAIMER
If set to 1, we show a disclaimer about generated outputs on login.
Web Search config
You can enable the web search through an API by adding YDC_API_KEY
(docs.you.com) or SERPER_API_KEY
(serper.dev) or SERPAPI_KEY
(serpapi.com) or SERPSTACK_API_KEY
(serpstack.com) to your .env.local
.
You can also simply enable the local websearch by setting USE_LOCAL_WEBSEARCH=true
in your .env.local
.
Custom models
You can customize the parameters passed to the model or even use a new model by updating the MODELS
variable in your .env.local
. The default one can be found in .env
and looks like this :
MODELS=`[
{
"name": "mistralai/Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2",
"displayName": "mistralai/Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2",
"description": "Mistral 7B is a new Apache 2.0 model, released by Mistral AI that outperforms Llama2 13B in benchmarks.",
"websiteUrl": "https://mistral.ai/news/announcing-mistral-7b/",
"preprompt": "",
"chatPromptTemplate" : "<s>{{#each messages}}{{#ifUser}}[INST] {{#if @first}}{{#if @root.preprompt}}{{@root.preprompt}}\n{{/if}}{{/if}}{{content}} [/INST]{{/ifUser}}{{#ifAssistant}}{{content}}</s>{{/ifAssistant}}{{/each}}",
"parameters": {
"temperature": 0.3,
"top_p": 0.95,
"repetition_penalty": 1.2,
"top_k": 50,
"truncate": 3072,
"max_new_tokens": 1024,
"stop": ["</s>"]
},
"promptExamples": [
{
"title": "Write an email from bullet list",
"prompt": "As a restaurant owner, write a professional email to the supplier to get these products every week: \n\n- Wine (x10)\n- Eggs (x24)\n- Bread (x12)"
}, {
"title": "Code a snake game",
"prompt": "Code a basic snake game in python, give explanations for each step."
}, {
"title": "Assist in a task",
"prompt": "How do I make a delicious lemon cheesecake?"
}
]
}
]`
You can change things like the parameters, or customize the preprompt to better suit your needs. You can also add more models by adding more objects to the array, with different preprompts for example.
chatPromptTemplate
When querying the model for a chat response, the chatPromptTemplate
template is used. messages
is an array of chat messages, it has the format [{ content: string }, ...]
. To identify if a message is a user message or an assistant message the ifUser
and ifAssistant
block helpers can be used.
The following is the default chatPromptTemplate
, although newlines and indentiation have been added for readability. You can find the prompts used in production for HuggingChat here.
{{preprompt}}
{{#each messages}}
{{#ifUser}}{{@root.userMessageToken}}{{content}}{{@root.userMessageEndToken}}{{/ifUser}}
{{#ifAssistant}}{{@root.assistantMessageToken}}{{content}}{{@root.assistantMessageEndToken}}{{/ifAssistant}}
{{/each}}
{{assistantMessageToken}}
Multi modal model
We currently only support IDEFICS as a multimodal model, hosted on TGI. You can enable it by using the followin config (if you have a PRO HF Api token):
{
"name": "HuggingFaceM4/idefics-80b-instruct",
"multimodal" : true,
"description": "IDEFICS is the new multimodal model by Hugging Face.",
"preprompt": "",
"chatPromptTemplate" : "{{#each messages}}{{#ifUser}}User: {{content}}{{/ifUser}}<end_of_utterance>\nAssistant: {{#ifAssistant}}{{content}}\n{{/ifAssistant}}{{/each}}",
"parameters": {
"temperature": 0.1,
"top_p": 0.95,
"repetition_penalty": 1.2,
"top_k": 12,
"truncate": 1000,
"max_new_tokens": 1024,
"stop": ["<end_of_utterance>", "User:", "\nUser:"]
}
}
Running your own models using a custom endpoint
If you want to, instead of hitting models on the Hugging Face Inference API, you can run your own models locally.
A good option is to hit a text-generation-inference endpoint. This is what is done in the official Chat UI Spaces Docker template for instance: both this app and a text-generation-inference server run inside the same container.
To do this, you can add your own endpoints to the MODELS
variable in .env.local
, by adding an "endpoints"
key for each model in MODELS
.
{
// rest of the model config here
"endpoints": [{
"type" : "tgi",
"url": "https://HOST:PORT",
}]
}
If endpoints
are left unspecified, ChatUI will look for the model on the hosted Hugging Face inference API using the model name.
OpenAI API compatible models
Chat UI can be used with any API server that supports OpenAI API compatibility, for example text-generation-webui, LocalAI, FastChat, llama-cpp-python, and ialacol.
The following example config makes Chat UI works with text-generation-webui, the endpoint.baseUrl
is the url of the OpenAI API compatible server, this overrides the baseUrl to be used by OpenAI instance. The endpoint.completion
determine which endpoint to be used, default is chat_completions
which uses v1/chat/completions
, change to endpoint.completion
to completions
to use the v1/completions
endpoint.
MODELS=`[
{
"name": "text-generation-webui",
"id": "text-generation-webui",
"parameters": {
"temperature": 0.9,
"top_p": 0.95,
"repetition_penalty": 1.2,
"top_k": 50,
"truncate": 1000,
"max_new_tokens": 1024,
"stop": []
},
"endpoints": [{
"type" : "openai",
"baseURL": "http://localhost:8000/v1"
}]
}
]`
The openai
type includes official OpenAI models. You can add, for example, GPT4/GPT3.5 as a "openai" model:
OPENAI_API_KEY=#your openai api key here
MODELS=`[{
"name": "gpt-4",
"displayName": "GPT 4",
"endpoints" : [{
"type": "openai"
}]
},
{
"name": "gpt-3.5-turbo",
"displayName": "GPT 3.5 Turbo",
"endpoints" : [{
"type": "openai"
}]
}]`
Llama.cpp API server
chat-ui also supports the llama.cpp API server directly without the need for an adapter. You can do this using the llamacpp
endpoint type.
If you want to run chat-ui with llama.cpp, you can do the following, using Zephyr as an example model:
- Get the weights from the hub
- Run the server with the following command:
./server -m models/zephyr-7b-beta.Q4_K_M.gguf -c 2048 -np 3
- Add the following to your
.env.local
:
MODELS=`[
{
"name": "Local Zephyr",
"chatPromptTemplate": "<|system|>\n{{preprompt}}</s>\n{{#each messages}}{{#ifUser}}<|user|>\n{{content}}</s>\n<|assistant|>\n{{/ifUser}}{{#ifAssistant}}{{content}}</s>\n{{/ifAssistant}}{{/each}}",
"parameters": {
"temperature": 0.1,
"top_p": 0.95,
"repetition_penalty": 1.2,
"top_k": 50,
"truncate": 1000,
"max_new_tokens": 2048,
"stop": ["</s>"]
},
"endpoints": [
{
"url": "http://127.0.0.1:8080",
"type": "llamacpp"
}
]
}
]`
Start chat-ui with npm run dev
and you should be able to chat with Zephyr locally.
Ollama
We also support the Ollama inference server. Spin up a model with
ollama run mistral
Then specify the endpoints like so:
MODELS=`[
{
"name": "Ollama Mistral",
"chatPromptTemplate": "<s>{{#each messages}}{{#ifUser}}[INST] {{#if @first}}{{#if @root.preprompt}}{{@root.preprompt}}\n{{/if}}{{/if}} {{content}} [/INST]{{/ifUser}}{{#ifAssistant}}{{content}}</s> {{/ifAssistant}}{{/each}}",
"parameters": {
"temperature": 0.1,
"top_p": 0.95,
"repetition_penalty": 1.2,
"top_k": 50,
"truncate": 3072,
"max_new_tokens": 1024,
"stop": ["</s>"]
},
"endpoints": [
{
"type": "ollama",
"url" : "http://127.0.0.1:11434",
"ollamaName" : "mistral"
}
]
}
]`
Amazon
You can also specify your Amazon SageMaker instance as an endpoint for chat-ui. The config goes like this:
"endpoints": [
{
"type" : "aws",
"service" : "sagemaker"
"url": "",
"accessKey": "",
"secretKey" : "",
"sessionToken": "",
"region": "",
"weight": 1
}
]
You can also set "service" : "lambda"
to use a lambda instance.
You can get the accessKey
and secretKey
from your AWS user, under programmatic access.
Custom endpoint authorization
Basic and Bearer
Custom endpoints may require authorization, depending on how you configure them. Authentication will usually be set either with Basic
or Bearer
.
For Basic
we will need to generate a base64 encoding of the username and password.
echo -n "USER:PASS" | base64
VVNFUjpQQVNT
For Bearer
you can use a token, which can be grabbed from here.
You can then add the generated information and the authorization
parameter to your .env.local
.
"endpoints": [
{
"url": "https://HOST:PORT",
"authorization": "Basic VVNFUjpQQVNT",
}
]
Please note that if HF_TOKEN
is also set or not empty, it will take precedence.
Models hosted on multiple custom endpoints
If the model being hosted will be available on multiple servers/instances add the weight
parameter to your .env.local
. The weight
will be used to determine the probability of requesting a particular endpoint.
"endpoints": [
{
"url": "https://HOST:PORT",
"weight": 1
}
{
"url": "https://HOST:PORT",
"weight": 2
}
...
]
Client Certificate Authentication (mTLS)
Custom endpoints may require client certificate authentication, depending on how you configure them. To enable mTLS between Chat UI and your custom endpoint, you will need to set the USE_CLIENT_CERTIFICATE
to true
, and add the CERT_PATH
and KEY_PATH
parameters to your .env.local
. These parameters should point to the location of the certificate and key files on your local machine. The certificate and key files should be in PEM format. The key file can be encrypted with a passphrase, in which case you will also need to add the CLIENT_KEY_PASSWORD
parameter to your .env.local
.
If you're using a certificate signed by a private CA, you will also need to add the CA_PATH
parameter to your .env.local
. This parameter should point to the location of the CA certificate file on your local machine.
If you're using a self-signed certificate, e.g. for testing or development purposes, you can set the REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED
parameter to false
in your .env.local
. This will disable certificate validation, and allow Chat UI to connect to your custom endpoint.
Specific Embedding Model
A model can use any of the embedding models defined in .env.local
, (currently used when web searching),
by default it will use the first embedding model, but it can be changed with the field embeddingModel
:
TEXT_EMBEDDING_MODELS = `[
{
"name": "Xenova/gte-small",
"chunkCharLength": 512,
"endpoints": [
{"type": "transformersjs"}
]
},
{
"name": "intfloat/e5-base-v2",
"chunkCharLength": 768,
"endpoints": [
{"type": "tei", "url": "http://127.0.0.1:8080/", "authorization": "Basic VVNFUjpQQVNT"},
{"type": "tei", "url": "http://127.0.0.1:8081/"}
]
}
]`
MODELS=`[
{
"name": "Ollama Mistral",
"chatPromptTemplate": "...",
"embeddingModel": "intfloat/e5-base-v2"
"parameters": {
...
},
"endpoints": [
...
]
}
]`
Deploying to a HF Space
Create a DOTENV_LOCAL
secret to your HF space with the content of your .env.local, and they will be picked up automatically when you run.
Building
To create a production version of your app:
npm run build
You can preview the production build with npm run preview
.
To deploy your app, you may need to install an adapter for your target environment.
Config changes for HuggingChat
The config file for HuggingChat is stored in the .env.template
file at the root of the repository. It is the single source of truth that is used to generate the actual .env.local
file using our CI/CD pipeline. See updateProdEnv for more details.
If you want to make changes to model config for HuggingChat, you should do so against
.env.template
.
We currently use the following secrets for deploying HuggingChat in addition to the .env.template
above:
MONGODB_URL
HF_TOKEN
OPENID_CONFIG
SERPER_API_KEY
They are defined as secrets in the repository.
Testing config changes locally
You can test the config changes locally by first creating an .env.SECRET_CONFIG
file with the secrets defined above. Then you can run the following command to generate the .env.local
file:
npm run updateLocalEnv
This will replace your .env.local
file with the one that will be used in prod (simply taking .env.template + .env.SECRET_CONFIG
).