onyx/deployment/docker_compose/README.md

Welcome to Onyx

To set up Onyx there are several options, Onyx supports the following for deployment:

1. Quick guided install via the install.sh script
2. Pulling the repo and running docker compose up -d from the deployment/docker_compose directory

• Note, it is recommended to copy over the env.template file to .env and edit the necessary values

3. For large scale deployments leveraging Kubernetes, there are two options, Helm or Terraform.

This README focuses on the easiest guided deployment which is via install.sh.

For more detailed guides, please refer to the documentation: https://docs.onyx.app/deployment/overview

install.sh script

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/onyx-dot-app/onyx/main/deployment/docker_compose/install.sh > install.sh && chmod +x install.sh && ./install.sh

The script installs the Onyx CLI (onyx-cli) and hands over to onyx-cli deploy install, which is where the guided installation lives. Any flags you pass are forwarded to it. If you already have the CLI (pip install onyx-cli), skip the script and run onyx-cli deploy install directly.

This provides a guided installation of Onyx via Docker Compose. It will deploy the latest version of Onyx and set up the volumes to ensure data is persisted across deployments or upgrades.

The deployment files are stored in ~/.config/onyx (an existing onyx_data directory from an older install is detected and kept in place; --dir targets another location). Note that no application critical data is stored in that directory so even if you delete it, the data needed to restore the app will not be destroyed.

The data about chats, users, etc. are instead stored as named Docker Volumes. This is managed by Docker and where it is stored will depend on your Docker setup. You can always delete these as well by running onyx-cli deploy uninstall.

To shut down the deployment without deleting, use onyx-cli deploy stop.

Managing the deployment

Beyond installing, the CLI covers the rest of the lifecycle:

Command	What it does
onyx-cli deploy status	Installed version, containers, and health (--json for scripts)
onyx-cli deploy logs [service...]	Logs of the deployment's containers
onyx-cli deploy stop	Stop the containers, keep the data
onyx-cli deploy upgrade [--tag vX.Y.Z]	Upgrade in place (see below)
onyx-cli deploy uninstall	Remove the containers, volumes, and deployment directory

Upgrading the deployment

Onyx maintains backwards compatibility across all minor versions following SemVer, so upgrading is onyx-cli deploy upgrade (add --tag vX.Y.Z to pin a version). It rewrites only IMAGE_TAG, preserves your .env edits, and backs up hand-edited files.

If you are more comfortable running docker compose commands, you can also run commands directly from the directory with the docker-compose.yml file. First bring the containers down (docker compose down), verify the version you want in the environment file (see below), (if using latest tag, be sure to run docker compose pull) and run docker compose up to restart the services on the latest version

A hand-run upgrade from a release before v5.0 of an install on the bundled MinIO (.env has S3_ENDPOINT_URL=http://minio:9000) needs two more .env edits before docker compose up, since v5.0 moves the bundled file store from MinIO to the object store and only onyx-cli deploy upgrade makes them for you: set S3_ENDPOINT_URL=http://object-store:8333 and add S3_LEGACY_ENDPOINT_URL=http://minio:9000. Keep MINIO_REPLICAS unset or 1 until you retire MinIO, since it still holds the files. Without the two edits the app keeps its files in MinIO, which a later release removes. The api_server and object-store-copy logs warn about this at startup. External storage (S3, GCS, Azure) needs no change. See the object store migration guide.

Rolling back the deployment

A rollback does not change the database schema. An older release fails to start on a newer schema with Can't locate revision. Only the newer image has the migrations to downgrade it. The downgrade deletes data that only the newer release stores.

First get the last migration of the target release. For v4.9 it is 25053020dd5a.

docker run --rm onyxdotapp/onyx-backend:<target version> alembic heads

Then downgrade with the newer image and roll back immediately. Run the downgrade in the directory with the compose files. On a prod install, add -f docker-compose.prod.yml after docker compose. If docker compose ls shows a project name other than onyx, add -p <project>. Run onyx-cli from where you usually run it, or pass --dir <install root>. It warns that downgrades are not supported. Continue, because the schema now matches.

IMAGE_TAG=<newer version> docker compose run --rm --no-deps api_server alembic downgrade <target migration>
onyx-cli deploy upgrade --tag <target version> --allow-downgrade

If you rolled back first and api_server restarts in a loop, run the same downgrade command. api_server then starts on the target release.

Customizing the compose files

The CLI owns the compose files it writes. Each onyx-cli deploy upgrade refreshes them to match the new version. If you edit one, the CLI asks before it replaces the file, and it keeps a backup — but your edits are not applied again.

To customize the deployment, put your changes in a file next to docker-compose.yml, named compose.override.yml, compose.override.yaml, docker-compose.override.yml, or docker-compose.override.yaml. These are the same names docker compose finds on its own; if more than one is present, the CLI picks the same one Compose would, in that order. The CLI applies that file last, after its own files, so your changes win. The CLI does not manage the override: it never writes, replaces, or backs it up, and an upgrade does not touch it. install, upgrade, stop, logs, and uninstall all apply it.

For example, to put Onyx behind your own reverse proxy, stop nginx from publishing a host port and attach it to your proxy's network:

# deployment/docker-compose.override.yml
services:
  nginx:
    # !reset replaces the list. Without it, Compose adds to the list.
    ports: !reset []
    networks: [default, proxy]

networks:
  proxy:
    external: true

Use docker compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.override.yml config in the deployment directory to see the merged result. Add each file the CLI applies (docker-compose.onyx-lite.yml, docker-compose.prod.yml, and so on) in the same order the CLI does.

Environment variables

The Docker Compose files try to look for a .env file in the same directory. The installer sets it up from a file called env.template. Feel free to edit the .env file to customize your deployment. The most important / common changed values are located near the top of the file. Later onyx-cli deploy runs keep your edits.

IMAGE_TAG is the version of Onyx to run. It is recommended to leave it as latest to get all updates with each redeployment.

Every image publishes a -dev twin for each of its tags (e.g. latest-dev, v1.2.3-dev), so a single IMAGE_TAG=latest-dev selects the dev variant of the whole deployment. Today only the backend image actually differs: its -dev twin adds interactive debugging tools (vim, nano, curl, ps, psql) that the default image leaves out to stay minimal. The web-server, model-server, and sandbox -dev tags are identical to their plain counterparts and exist so that one version string covers every image.

Self-hosted embedding models and air-gapped deployments

The model-server image contains one embedding model: ibm-granite/granite-embedding-97m-multilingual-r2, the default for new installs. It works with no network access.

The model servers download all other self-hosted embedding models from Hugging Face the first time they use them. This includes nomic-ai/nomic-embed-text-v1, which older images contained. The downloads go to the model_cache_huggingface and indexing_huggingface_model_cache volumes. When a model is in these volumes, the model servers load it from there with no network access. An upgrade keeps the models that are already in the volumes.

For an air-gapped deployment:

• Keep these volumes when you upgrade. Do not delete them.
• To use a self-hosted model that is not in the volumes, give the model servers network access to Hugging Face once, or copy the model into the Hugging Face cache in both volumes before you select it. Onyx loads its recommended self-hosted models at the revision that backend/shared_configs/embedding_models.py pins, so copy that revision.