agentic RAG demo

Building up on this excellent video from AI Makerspace, this project implements a RAG system that queries data about... RAG systems.

It uses a Streamlit UI to interact with the RAG system. The app is accessible on https://rag.yactouat.com. Contact me @ yacine.touati.pro@gmail.com to access the app.

The LLMs under the hood are a mixture of ChatGPT 4 and 3.5.

pre requisites

To be able to use the application, you need:

• a working Python environment (I use 3.12)
• an OpenAI API key

run locally

To run the application locally: streamlit run agentic_rag.py OR python3 -m streamlit run agentic_rag.py.

run on an Ubuntu server

Deployment is done using GitHub Actions on push to the master branch, you need to fill in a few repository secrets, as stated in the .github/workflows/cicd.yml file.

installation steps before letting the CI/CD pipeline run its course

These are actions you need to do on the remote server before you can run pipelines (I've run them on an Ubuntu 24 server)

• mkdir ~/agentic-rag-demo
• clone this very repo on your machine in order to be able to copy it to the server
• from your local machine =>

scp -r <repo> <user>@<remote-server-ip>:/home/<remote-user>/agentic-rag-demo (replace <repo>, <user>, <remote-server-ip>, and <remote-user> with the appropriate values

• back to your remote server from there on: sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
• sudo apt install nginx
• sudo apt install apache2-utils
• sudo mkdir -p /var/www/<domain> (replace <domain> with your domain or subdomain)
• sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/<domain>
• sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/<domain>
• sudo htpasswd -c /etc/nginx/.htpasswd demo (demo is the username, you will be prompted to enter a password)
• sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/<domain>.conf
• add the following content:

server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;

    root /var/www/<domain>;
    index index.html;

    server_name <domain>;

    location / {
        auth_basic "demo app request password @ yacine.touati.pro@gmail.com";
        auth_basic_user_file /etc/nginx/.htpasswd;
    
        proxy_pass http://0.0.0.0:8501;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
        proxy_read_timeout 86400;
    }

}

• sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/<domain>.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
• sudo nginx -t
• sudo systemctl reload nginx
• configure an A record in your DNS settings to point to your server's IP address for your domain or subdomain
• cd ~/agentic-rag-demo
• pip install -r requirements.txt
• streamlit run agentic_rag.py
• at this point, you should be able to see the dummy content when you navigate to your domain or subdomain on plain HTTP (after DNS propagation)
• now follow the instructions on certbot website to put the app behind HTTPS, you should now have a working RAG system accessible on your domain or subdomain 😎
• now we want to create a service for the app to run in the background, this helps us:
  • manage crashes
  • start the app on boot
  • release the terminal when we start the app from our CI/CD pipeline
  • provide us with an easy way of stopping the app in the same CI/CD pipeline before updating it
• mkdir -p ~/.config/systemd/user
• nano ~/.config/systemd/user/agentic-rag.service
• write the following content:

[Unit]
Description=a service for the agentic rag demo
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/python3 -m streamlit run /home/<remote-user>/agentic-rag-demo/agentic_rag.py
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=2

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

... don't forget to replace the placeholders with the appropriate values.

• now we need our service to be stoppable/start-able from our CI/CD pipeline with our regular user, so let's do =>

systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable --now agentic-rag.service
systemctl --user start agentic-rag.service
systemctl --user status agentic-rag.service

• to stop the service => systemctl --user stop agentic-rag.service
• we are now ready to let the CI/CD pipeline do its magic 🚀