Course Materials RAG System

A Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system designed to answer questions about course materials using semantic search and AI-powered responses.

This application is a full-stack web application that enables users to query course materials and receive intelligent, context-aware responses. It uses ChromaDB for vector storage, Anthropic's Claude for AI generation, and provides a web interface for interaction.

• Docker and Docker Compose
• An Anthropic API key (for Claude AI)

• Python 3.13 or higher
• uv (Python package manager)
• An Anthropic API key (for Claude AI)
• For Windows: Use Git Bash to run the application commands - Download Git for Windows

Set up environment variables (required for both Docker and native installation)

Create a .env file in the root directory:

ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=your_anthropic_api_key_here

To get an Anthropic API key:

1. Go to https://console.anthropic.com
2. Sign up or log in
3. Navigate to "API Keys" and create a new key

No additional installation needed if you have Docker installed.

1. Install uv (if not already installed)

   curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

2. Install Python dependencies

   uv sync

Start the application:

docker-compose up --build -d

The application will be available at:

• Web Interface: http://localhost:5000
• API Documentation: http://localhost:5000/docs

Useful Docker commands:

# View logs
docker-compose logs -f

# Stop the application
docker-compose down

# Restart after .env changes
docker-compose down && docker-compose up -d

# Clear all data and restart
docker-compose down -v && docker-compose up --build -d

Quick Start - Use the provided shell script:

chmod +x run.sh
./run.sh

Manual Start:

cd backend
uv run uvicorn app:app --reload --port 8000

The application will be available at:

• Web Interface: http://localhost:8000
• API Documentation: http://localhost:8000/docs

• Semantic Search: Uses ChromaDB with vector embeddings for intelligent document retrieval
• AI-Powered Responses: Leverages Anthropic's Claude for generating contextual answers
• Course Management: Automatically processes and indexes course materials from the docs/ folder
• Conversation History: Maintains session-based conversation context
• Web Interface: Clean, responsive UI with markdown support and collapsible source citations
• Hot Reload: Development mode supports automatic code reloading (both Docker and native)

• Frontend: Vanilla JavaScript, HTML, CSS
• Backend: FastAPI (Python)
• Vector Database: ChromaDB
• AI Model: Anthropic Claude (claude-sonnet-4-20250514)
• Embeddings: Sentence Transformers (all-MiniLM-L6-v2)

1. Place your course documents (.txt, .pdf, or .docx) in the docs/ folder
2. Restart the application
3. The system will automatically process and index the new documents

For detailed documentation, see CLAUDE.md.