ragflow is a free, open source ai development platforms project written in Go and released under Apache-2.0. It has 93,365 GitHub stars, 11,207 forks and 1,525 open issues, and was last pushed 19 hours ago. On this registry it ranks #8 of 156 tracked projects in AI Development Platforms, with 5 head-to-head comparisons available. It gained 1,811 stars over the last 30 tracked days.

What is ragflow?

RAGFlow is an open-source Retrieval-Augmented Generation engine that fuses RAG with agent capabilities into a context layer for large language models, built for developers and teams that need to turn complex, unstructured documents into production AI systems.

What it is

RAGFlow is an Apache-2.0 licensed project published under the AI & Machine Learning / AI Development Platforms category in this registry, listed here with 90,881 stars and 10,757 forks, and described as a Go project in the registry metadata while its self-hosting path also requires Python. At its centre sits a converged context engine paired with pre-built agent templates, so developers can move from raw documents to a working AI system without assembling the pipeline themselves. The engine is built around deep document understanding, template-based chunking, and grounded citations, and it exposes an API surface for integration into business applications.

The concrete problem it solves is the hand-wired retrieval stack. Teams that build RAG themselves must otherwise stitch together document parsers, chunkers, embedding models, vector recall, re-ranking, and prompt assembly, then keep that glue working as models change. RAGFlow replaces that bespoke orchestration with a single workflow: configurable LLMs and embedding models, multiple recall paired with fused re-ranking, and chunking that can be inspected and corrected by a human before answers are generated. It lives in the same ecosystem as the LLM providers it consumes, currently including DeepSeek v4, Gemini 3 Pro, and the GPT-5 series.

Key capabilities

  • Deep document understanding via the deepdoc module, extracting knowledge from unstructured data in complicated formats.
  • Template-based chunking with visualization of the resulting chunks, so a person can intervene before ingestion is finalised.
  • Grounded citations with traceable references, aimed at reducing hallucination in generated answers.
  • Compatibility with heterogeneous sources: Word, Slides, Excel, TXT, images, scanned copies, structured data, and web pages.
  • Configurable LLMs and embedding models, multiple recall, and fused re-ranking in one orchestration path.
  • Agentic workflow with MCP support, plus a Python/JavaScript code executor component that requires gVisor.
  • Data synchronisation connectors for Confluence, S3, Notion, Discord, and Google Drive, and multiple chat channels including Feishu, Discord, Telegram, and Line.

Who uses it and how

  • Enterprises of any scale running internal knowledge search where answers must carry traceable citations back to source documents.
  • Application developers integrating retrieval into business software through the project's APIs rather than a separate search service.
  • Teams building agent workflows that need agent Memory, MCP tool calls, and sandboxed code execution.
  • Organisations with large existing document estates that want Connector-based sync from Confluence, Notion, Google Drive, or S3 instead of manual uploads.
  • Self-hosting operators running the Docker and Docker Compose deployment on machines with at least 4 CPU cores, 16 GB RAM, and 50 GB disk.

Getting started

A hosted cloud option is available at https://cloud.ragflow.io. Self-hosting follows the repository's Docker and Docker Compose instructions after raising vm.max_map_count to at least 262144 and installing Python 3.13 or newer.

How it compares

The facts provided name no paid products that RAGFlow replaces, and they name no comparable open-source retrieval engine either. On the record available here, it stands alone in this registry.

When to use it — and when not to

A self-hoster must operate the Docker and Docker Compose stack, tune vm.max_map_count, meet the 4-core, 16 GB RAM and 50 GB disk floor, and install gVisor separately if the code executor sandbox is wanted — although the README excerpt does not spell out the backing database, object storage, or SMTP settings, so those must be confirmed in the full documentation before committing. Anyone unwilling to run that infrastructure should take the hosted cloud service instead. The listing also carries 1,525 open issues, which is a large backlog to weigh against the project's recent activity.

project readme (upstream, from github) — read inline
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RAGFlow in the GitHub Octoverse

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📕 Table of Contents

💡 What is RAGFlow?

RAGFlow is a leading open-source Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) engine that fuses cutting-edge RAG with Agent capabilities to create a superior context layer for LLMs. It offers a streamlined RAG workflow adaptable to enterprises of any scale. Powered by a converged context engine and pre-built agent templates, RAGFlow enables developers to transform complex data into high-fidelity, production-ready AI systems with exceptional efficiency and precision.

🎮 Get Started

Try our cloud service at https://cloud.ragflow.io.

Chunking demonstration Agentic workflow demonstration

🔥 Latest Updates

  • 2026-06-15 Support multiple chat channels such as Feishu, Discord, Telegram, Line, etc.
  • 2026-04-24 Supports DeepSeek v4.
  • 2026-03-24 RAGFlow Skill on OpenClaw — Provides an official skill for accessing RAGFlow datasets via OpenClaw.
  • 2025-12-26 Supports 'Memory' for AI agent.
  • 2025-11-19 Supports Gemini 3 Pro.
  • 2025-11-12 Supports data synchronization from Confluence, S3, Notion, Discord, Google Drive.
  • 2025-10-23 Supports MinerU & Docling as document parsing methods.
  • 2025-10-15 Supports orchestrable ingestion pipeline.
  • 2025-08-08 Supports OpenAI's latest GPT-5 series models.
  • 2025-08-01 Supports agentic workflow and MCP.
  • 2025-05-23 Adds a Python/JavaScript code executor component to Agent.
  • 2025-03-19 Supports using a multi-modal model to make sense of images within PDF or DOCX files.

🎉 Stay Tuned

⭐️ Star our repository to stay up-to-date with exciting new features and improvements! Get instant notifications for new releases! 🌟

RAGFlow feature updates

🌟 Key Features

🍭 "Quality in, quality out"

  • Deep document understanding-based knowledge extraction from unstructured data with complicated formats.
  • Finds "needle in a data haystack" of literally unlimited tokens.

🍱 Template-based chunking

  • Intelligent and explainable.
  • Plenty of template options to choose from.

🌱 Grounded citations with reduced hallucinations

  • Visualization of text chunking to allow human intervention.
  • Quick view of the key references and traceable citations to support grounded answers.

🍔 Compatibility with heterogeneous data sources

  • Supports Word, Slides, Excel, TXT, images, scanned copies, structured data, web pages, and more.

🛀 Automated and effortless RAG workflow

  • Streamlined RAG orchestration catered to both personal and large businesses.
  • Configurable LLMs as well as embedding models.
  • Multiple recall paired with fused re-ranking.
  • Intuitive APIs for seamless integration with business.

🔎 System Architecture

RAGFlow system architecture

🎬 Self-Hosting

📝 Prerequisites

  • CPU >= 4 cores
  • RAM >= 16 GB
  • Disk >= 50 GB
  • Docker >= 24.0.0 & Docker Compose >= v2.26.1
  • Python >= 3.13
  • gVisor: Required only if you intend to use the code executor (sandbox) feature of RAGFlow.

[!TIP] If you have not installed Docker on your local machine (Windows, Mac, or Linux), see Install Docker Engine.

🚀 Start up the server

  1. Ensure vm.max_map_count >= 262144:

    To check the value of vm.max_map_count:

    sysctl vm.max_map_count
    

    Reset vm.max_map_count to a value at least 262144 if it is not.

    # In this case, we set it to 262144:
    sudo sysctl -w vm.max_map_count=262144
    

    This change will be reset after a system reboot. To ensure your change remains permanent, add or update the vm.max_map_count value in /etc/sysctl.conf accordingly:

    vm.max_map_count=262144
    
  2. Clone the repo:

    git clone https://github.com/infiniflow/ragflow.git
    
  3. Start up the server using the pre-built Docker images:

[!CAUTION] All Docker images are built for x86 platforms. We don't currently offer Docker images for ARM64. If you are on an ARM64 platform, follow this guide to build a Docker image compatible with your system.

The command below downloads the v0.27.2 edition of the RAGFlow Docker image. See the following table for descriptions of different RAGFlow editions. To download a RAGFlow edition different from v0.27.2, update the RAGFLOW_IMAGE variable accordingly in docker/.env before using docker compose to start the server.

   cd ragflow/docker

   git checkout v0.27.2
   # Optional: use a stable tag (see releases: https://github.com/infiniflow/ragflow/releases)
   # This step ensures the **entrypoint.sh** file in the code matches the Docker image version.

   # Use CPU for DeepDoc tasks:
   docker compose -f docker-compose.yml up -d

   # To use GPU to accelerate DeepDoc tasks:
   # sed -i '1i DEVICE=gpu' .env
   # docker compose -f docker-compose.yml up -d

Note: Prior to v0.22.0, we provided both images with embedding models and slim images without embedding models. Details as follows:

RAGFlow image tag Image size (GB) Has embedding models? Stable?
v0.21.1 ≈9 ✔️ Stable release
v0.21.1-slim ≈2 ❌ Stable release

Starting with v0.22.0, we ship only the slim edition and no longer append the -slim suffix to the image tag.

  1. Check the server status after having the server up and running:

    docker logs -f docker-ragflow-cpu-1
    

    The following output confirms a successful launch of the system:

    
          ____   ___    ______ ______ __
         / __ \ /   |  / ____// ____// /____  _      __
        / /_/ // /| | / / __ / /_   / // __ \| | /| / /
       / _, _// ___ |/ /_/ // __/  / // /_/ /| |/ |/ /
      /_/ |_|/_/  |_|\____//_/    /_/ \____/ |__/|__/
    
     * Running on all addresses (0.0.0.0)
    

    If you skip this confirmation step and directly log in to RAGFlow, your browser may prompt a network abnormal error because, at that moment, your RAGFlow may not be fully initialized.

  2. In your web browser, enter the IP address of your server and log in to RAGFlow.

    With the default settings, you only need to enter http://IP_OF_YOUR_MACHINE (sans port number) as the default HTTP serving port 80 can be omitted when using the default configurations.

  3. In service_conf.yaml.template, select the desired LLM factory in user_default_llm and update the API_KEY field with the corresponding API key.

    See llm_api_key_setup for more information.

    The show is on!

🔧 Configurations

When it comes to system configurations, you will need to manage the following files:

  • .env: Keeps the fundamental setups for the system, such as SVR_HTTP_PORT, MYSQL_PASSWORD, and MINIO_PASSWORD.
  • service_conf.yaml.template: Configures the back-end services. The environment variables in this file will be automatically populated when the Docker container starts. Any environment variables set within the Docker container will be available for use, allowing you to customize service behavior based on the deployment environment.
  • docker-compose.yml: The system relies on docker-compose.yml to start up.

The ./docker/README file provides a detailed description of the environment settings and service configurations which can be used as ${ENV_VARS} in the service_conf.yaml.template file.

To update the default HTTP serving port (80), go to docker-compose.yml and change 80:80 to :80.

Updates to the above configurations require a reboot of all containers to take effect:

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml up -d

Switch doc engine from Elasticsearch to Infinity

RAGFlow uses Elasticsearch by default for storing full text and vectors. To switch to Infinity, follow these steps:

  1. Stop all running containers:

    docker compose -f docker/docker-compose.yml down -v
    

[!WARNING] -v will delete the docker container volumes, and the existing data will be cleared.

  1. Set DOC_ENGINE in docker/.env to infinity.

  2. Start the containers:

    docker compose -f docker/docker-compose.yml up -d
    

[!WARNING] Switching to Infinity on a Linux/arm64 machine is not yet officially supported.

🔧 Build a Docker Image

This image is approximately 2 GB in size and relies on external LLM and embedding services.

git clone https://github.com/infiniflow/ragflow.git
cd ragflow/
docker build --platform linux/amd64 -f Dockerfile -t infiniflow/ragflow:nightly .

Or if you are behind a proxy, you can pass proxy arguments:

docker build --platform linux/amd64 \
  --build-arg http_proxy=http://YOUR_PROXY:PORT \
  --build-arg https_proxy=http://YOUR_PROXY:PORT \
  -f Dockerfile -t infiniflow/ragflow:nightly .

🔨 Launch Service from Source for Development

[!IMPORTANT] After cloning the repository for the first time, run git config --local --unset core.hooksPath, uv tool install lefthook and lefthook install once from the repo root to enable local Git hooks.

  1. Install uv, or skip this step if it is already installed:

    pipx install uv
    
  2. Clone the source code and install Python dependencies:

    git clone https://github.com/infiniflow/ragflow.git
    cd ragflow/
    uv sync --python 3.13 # install RAGFlow dependent python modules
    uv run python3 ragflow_deps/download_deps.py
    git config --local --unset core.hooksPath
    uv tool install lefthook
    lefthook install
    
  3. Launch the dependent services (MinIO, Elasticsearch, Redis, and MySQL) using Docker Compose:

    docker compose -f docker/docker-compose-base.yml up -d
    

    Add the following line to /etc/hosts to resolve all hosts specified in docker/.env to 127.0.0.1:

    127.0.0.1       es01 infinity mysql minio redis sandbox-executor-manager
    
  4. If you cannot access HuggingFace, set the HF_ENDPOINT environment variable to use a mirror site:

    export HF_ENDPOINT=https://hf-mirror.com
    
  5. If your operating system does not have jemalloc, please install it as follows:

    # Ubuntu
    sudo apt-get install libjemalloc-dev
    # CentOS
    sudo yum install jemalloc
    # OpenSUSE
    sudo zypper install jemalloc
    # macOS
    brew install jemalloc
    
  6. Launch backend service:

    source .venv/bin/activate
    export PYTHONPATH=$(pwd)
    bash docker/launch_backend_service.sh
    
  7. Install frontend dependencies:

    cd web
    npm install
    
  8. Launch frontend service:

    npm run dev
    

    The following output confirms a successful launch of the system:

    RAGFlow web interface

  9. Stop RAGFlow front-end and back-end service after development is complete:

    pkill -f "ragflow_server.py|task_executor.py"
    

📚 Documentation

📜 Roadmap

See the RAGFlow Roadmap 2026

🏄 Community

🙌 Contributing

RAGFlow flourishes via open-source collaboration. In this spirit, we embrace diverse contributions from the community. If you would like to be a part, review our Contribution Guidelines first.

Frequently asked questions

Is ragflow free to use?

ragflow is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. There is no licence fee and no seat count — you can self-host it or, where the project offers one, pay a vendor for a managed version instead.

What does ragflow do?

RAGFlow is a leading open-source Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) engine that fuses cutting-edge RAG with Agent capabilities to create a superior context la

What is ragflow written in?

ragflow is primarily written in Go. Its source is publicly available at https://github.com/infiniflow/ragflow, and it has 93,365 GitHub stars.