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Contributing to Onyx

Hey there! We are so excited that you're interested in Onyx.

As an open source project in a rapidly changing space, we welcome all contributions.

💃 Guidelines

Contribution Opportunities

The GitHub Issues page is a great place to start for contribution ideas.

To ensure that your contribution is aligned with the project's direction, please reach out to any maintainer on the Onyx team via Discord or email.

Issues that have been explicitly approved by the maintainers (aligned with the direction of the project) will be marked with the approved by maintainers label. Issues marked good first issue are an especially great place to start.

Connectors to other tools are another great place to contribute. For details on how, refer to this README.md.

If you have a new/different contribution in mind, we'd love to hear about it! Your input is vital to making sure that Onyx moves in the right direction. Before starting on implementation, please raise a GitHub issue.

Also, always feel free to message the founders (Chris Weaver / Yuhong Sun) on Discord directly about anything at all.

Contributing Code

To contribute to this project, please follow the "fork and pull request" workflow. When opening a pull request, mention related issues and feel free to tag relevant maintainers.

Before creating a pull request please make sure that the new changes conform to the formatting and linting requirements. See the Formatting and Linting section for how to run these checks locally.

Getting Help 🙋

Our goal is to make contributing as easy as possible. If you run into any issues please don't hesitate to reach out. That way we can help future contributors and users can avoid the same issue.

We also have support channels and generally interesting discussions on our Discord.

We would love to see you there!

Get Started 🚀

Onyx being a fully functional app, relies on some external software, specifically:

  • Postgres (Relational DB)
  • Vespa (Vector DB/Search Engine)
  • Redis (Cache)
  • MinIO (File Store)
  • Nginx (Not needed for development flows generally)

Note: This guide provides instructions to build and run Onyx locally from source with Docker containers providing the above external software. We believe this combination is easier for development purposes. If you prefer to use pre-built container images, we provide instructions on running the full Onyx stack within Docker below.

Local Set Up

Be sure to use Python version 3.11. For instructions on installing Python 3.11 on macOS, refer to the CONTRIBUTING_MACOS.md readme.

If using a lower version, modifications will have to be made to the code. If using a higher version, sometimes some libraries will not be available (i.e. we had problems with Tensorflow in the past with higher versions of python).

Backend: Python requirements

Currently, we use uv and recommend creating a virtual environment.

For convenience here's a command for it:

uv venv .venv --python 3.11
source .venv/bin/activate

For Windows, activate the virtual environment using Command Prompt:

.venv\Scripts\activate

If using PowerShell, the command slightly differs:

.venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1

Install the required python dependencies:

uv sync --all-extras

Install Playwright for Python (headless browser required by the Web Connector):

uv run playwright install

Frontend: Node dependencies

Onyx uses Node v22.20.0. We highly recommend you use Node Version Manager (nvm) to manage your Node installations. Once installed, you can run

nvm install 22 && nvm use 22
node -v # verify your active version

Navigate to onyx/web and run:

npm i

Formatting and Linting

Backend

For the backend, you'll need to setup pre-commit hooks (black / reorder-python-imports).

Then run:

uv run pre-commit install

Additionally, we use mypy for static type checking. Onyx is fully type-annotated, and we want to keep it that way! To run the mypy checks manually, run uv run mypy . from the onyx/backend directory.

Web

We use prettier for formatting. The desired version will be installed via a npm i from the onyx/web directory. To run the formatter, use npx prettier --write . from the onyx/web directory.

Pre-commit will also run prettier automatically on files you've recently touched. If re-formatted, your commit will fail. Re-stage your changes and commit again.

Running the application for development

Developing using VSCode Debugger (recommended)

We highly recommend using VSCode debugger for development. See CONTRIBUTING_VSCODE.md for more details.

Otherwise, you can follow the instructions below to run the application for development.

Manually running the application for development

Docker containers for external software

You will need Docker installed to run these containers.

First navigate to onyx/deployment/docker_compose, then start up Postgres/Vespa/Redis/MinIO with:

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.dev.yml up -d index relational_db cache minio

(index refers to Vespa, relational_db refers to Postgres, and cache refers to Redis)

Running Onyx locally

To start the frontend, navigate to onyx/web and run:

npm run dev

Next, start the model server which runs the local NLP models. Navigate to onyx/backend and run:

uvicorn model_server.main:app --reload --port 9000

For Windows (for compatibility with both PowerShell and Command Prompt):

powershell -Command "uvicorn model_server.main:app --reload --port 9000"

The first time running Onyx, you will need to run the DB migrations for Postgres. After the first time, this is no longer required unless the DB models change.

Navigate to onyx/backend and with the venv active, run:

alembic upgrade head

Next, start the task queue which orchestrates the background jobs. Jobs that take more time are run async from the API server.

Still in onyx/backend, run:

python ./scripts/dev_run_background_jobs.py

To run the backend API server, navigate back to onyx/backend and run:

AUTH_TYPE=disabled uvicorn onyx.main:app --reload --port 8080

For Windows (for compatibility with both PowerShell and Command Prompt):

powershell -Command "
    $env:AUTH_TYPE='disabled'
    uvicorn onyx.main:app --reload --port 8080
"

Note: If you need finer logging, add the additional environment variable LOG_LEVEL=DEBUG to the relevant services.

Wrapping up

You should now have 4 servers running:

  • Web server
  • Backend API
  • Model server
  • Background jobs

Now, visit http://localhost:3000 in your browser. You should see the Onyx onboarding wizard where you can connect your external LLM provider to Onyx.

You've successfully set up a local Onyx instance! 🏁

Running the Onyx application in a container

You can run the full Onyx application stack from pre-built images including all external software dependencies.

Navigate to onyx/deployment/docker_compose and run:

docker compose up -d

After Docker pulls and starts these containers, navigate to http://localhost:3000 to use Onyx.

If you want to make changes to Onyx and run those changes in Docker, you can also build a local version of the Onyx container images that incorporates your changes like so:

docker compose up -d --build

Release Process

Onyx loosely follows the SemVer versioning standard. Major changes are released with a "minor" version bump. Currently we use patch release versions to indicate small feature changes. A set of Docker containers will be pushed automatically to DockerHub with every tag. You can see the containers here.