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Server configuration

This section explains advanced operations and settings for running the Argilla Server and Argilla Python Client.

By default, the Argilla Server will look for your Elasticsearch (ES) endpoint at http://localhost:9200. You can customize this by setting the ARGILLA_ELASTICSEARCH environment variable. Have a look at the list of available environment variables to further configure the Argilla server.

From the Argilla version 1.19.0, you must set up the search engine manually to work with datasets. You should set the environment variable ARGILLA_SEARCH_ENGINE=opensearch or ARGILLA_SEARCH_ENGINE=elasticsearch depending on the backend you're using The default value for this variable is set to elasticsearch. The minimal version for Elasticsearch is 8.5.0, and for Opensearch is 2.4.0. Please, review your backend and upgrade it if necessary.

Warning

For vector search in OpenSearch, the filtering applied is using a post_filter step, since there is a bug that makes queries fail using filtering + knn from Argilla. See https://github.com/opensearch-project/k-NN/issues/1286

This may result in unexpected results when combining filtering with vector search with this engine.

Launching

Using a proxy

If you run Argilla behind a proxy by adding some extra prefix to expose the service, you should set the ARGILLA_BASE_URL environment variable to properly route requests to the server application.

For example, if your proxy exposes Argilla in the URL https://my-proxy/custom-path-for-argilla, you should launch the Argilla server with ARGILLA_BASE_URL=/custom-path-for-argilla.

NGINX and Traefik have been tested and are known to work with Argilla:

Environment variables

You can set the following environment variables to further configure your server and client.

Server

FastAPI

  • ARGILLA_HOME_PATH: The directory where Argilla will store all the files needed to run. If the path doesn't exist it will be automatically created (Default: ~/.argilla).

  • ARGILLA_BASE_URL: If you want to launch the Argilla server in a specific base path other than /, you should set up this environment variable. This can be useful when running Argilla behind a proxy that adds a prefix path to route the service (Default: "/").

  • ARGILLA_CORS_ORIGINS: List of host patterns for CORS origin access.

  • ARGILLA_DOCS_ENABLED: If False, disables openapi docs endpoint at /api/docs.

  • HF_HUB_DISABLE_TELEMETRY: If True, disables telemetry for usage metrics. Alternatively, you can disable telemetry by setting HF_HUB_OFFLINE=1.

Authentication

  • ARGILLA_AUTH_SECRET_KEY: The secret key used to sign the API token data. You can use openssl rand -hex 32 to generate a 32 character string to use with this environment variable. By default a random value is generated, so if you are using more than one server worker (or more than one Argilla server) you will need to set the same value for all of them.

Database

  • ARGILLA_DATABASE_URL: A URL string that contains the necessary information to connect to a database. Argilla uses SQLite by default, PostgreSQL is also officially supported (Default: sqlite:///$ARGILLA_HOME_PATH/argilla.db?check_same_thread=False).
SQLite

The following environment variables are useful only when SQLite is used:

  • ARGILLA_DATABASE_SQLITE_TIMEOUT: How many seconds the connection should wait before raising an OperationalError when a table is locked. If another connection opens a transaction to modify a table, that table will be locked until the transaction is committed. (Defaut: 15 seconds).
PostgreSQL

The following environment variables are useful only when PostgreSQL is used:

  • ARGILLA_DATABASE_POSTGRESQL_POOL_SIZE: The number of connections to keep open inside the database connection pool (Default: 15).

  • ARGILLA_DATABASE_POSTGRESQL_MAX_OVERFLOW: The number of connections that can be opened above and beyond ARGILLA_DATABASE_POSTGRESQL_POOL_SIZE setting (Default: 10).

Search engine

  • ARGILLA_ELASTICSEARCH: URL of the connection endpoint of the Elasticsearch instance (Default: http://localhost:9200).

  • ARGILLA_SEARCH_ENGINE: Search engine to use. Valid values are "elasticsearch" and "opensearch" (Default: "elasticsearch").

  • ARGILLA_ELASTICSEARCH_SSL_VERIFY: If "False", disables SSL certificate verification when connecting to the Elasticsearch backend.

  • ARGILLA_ELASTICSEARCH_CA_PATH: Path to CA cert for ES host. For example: /full/path/to/root-ca.pem (Optional)

Datasets

  • ARGILLA_LABEL_SELECTION_OPTIONS_MAX_ITEMS: Set the number of maximum items to be allowed by label and multi label questions (Default: 500).

  • ARGILLA_SPAN_OPTIONS_MAX_ITEMS: Set the number of maximum items to be allowed by span questions (Default: 500).

Hugging Face

  • ARGILLA_SHOW_HUGGINGFACE_SPACE_PERSISTENT_STORAGE_WARNING: When Argilla is running on Hugging Face Spaces you can use this environment variable to disable the warning message showed when persistent storage is disabled for the space (Default: true).

Docker images only

  • REINDEX_DATASETS: If true or 1, the datasets will be reindexed in the search engine. This is needed when some search configuration changed or data must be refreshed (Default: 0).

  • USERNAME: If provided, the owner username. This can be combined with HF OAuth to define the argilla server owner (Default: "").

  • PASSWORD: If provided, the owner password. If USERNAME and PASSWORD are provided, the owner user will be created with these credentials on the server startup (Default: "").

  • API_KEY: The default user api key to user. If API_KEY is not provided, a new random api key will be generated (Default: "").

  • UVICORN_APP: [Advanced] The name of the FastAPI app to run. This is useful when you want to extend the FastAPI app with additional routes or middleware. The default value is argilla_server:app.

REST API docs

FastAPI also provides beautiful REST API docs that you can check at http://localhost:6900/api/v1/docs.