Using EC2 (or an EC2 equivalent in your Cloud of choice) is the recommended way of deploying Danswer. It is simple and should meet the performance needs of 90% of organizations looking to use Danswer. While this guide is specifically for AWS EC2, the vast majority should apply to GCP Google Compute Engines, Azure Virtual Machines, DigitalOcean Droplets, etc. With all that said, we know that every company does things differently, and we’d love to help you figure out the ideal setup for your enterprise! Feel free to reach out to us via the links on our Contact Us page for more individual help.

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Getting an Instance

The first step is to start up an EC2 instance with the appropriate resources. We recommend at least 16GB of RAM, 4-8vCPU cores, and 500GB of disk for a small-mid sized organization (< 5000 users). For reference, in our Cloud offering we use a m7g.xlarge with 500GB of EBS storage. For the below guide, we will assume that you’ve chosen to use AWS Linux with the recommended m7g.xlarge instance. Instance When setting up the security group for the new instance, make sure that you allow for HTTPS traffic. Instance

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Pointing your Domain to the Instance

Next, we should point your domain to the EC2 instance we just created. To do this, we need to go to your DNS and add two records. For this guide, I’ll be assuming your DNS provider is GoDaddy, but it should be almost exactly the same for any DNS provider.
If you don’t have a domain to use yet, then you can either buy one from a DNS provider like GoDaddy or just skip HTTPS for now.
First, we need to grab the public IP address of the instance. You can do that in the page for your instance in the AWS Console. Instance Finally, we need to head to the DNS provider and add two entries into the DNS: Instance Instance The first record directs traffic to that domain to your EC2 instance. The second record will handle www.<YOUR_DOMAIN> and ensure that this also takes the user to your EC2 instance.

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Installing Dependencies

Next, we need to preprare the instance so we can actually get Danswer up and running. To do this, you’ll need three things: git, docker, and docker compose. For Amazon Linux 2023, this can be done with the following: 
sudo yum update -y

sudo yum install docker -y
sudo service docker start

sudo curl -L https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/latest/download/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m) -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

sudo yum install git

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Starting up Danswer

Now that we have everything we need we can startup Danswer. First, let’s clone the repo: 
git clone https://github.com/danswer-ai/danswer.git
Next, let’s set the necessary env variables: 
cd danswer/deployment/docker_compose
touch .env
touch .env.nginx
In the .env file, you can copy past the following (filling in the missing fields as needed): 
WEB_DOMAIN=<YOUR_DOMAIN>  # something like "danswer.ai"

# if your email is something like "chris@danswer.ai", then this should be "danswer.ai"
# this prevents people outside your company from creating an account
VALID_EMAIL_DOMAINS=<YOUR_COMPANIES_EMAIL_DOMAIN>  

AUTH_TYPE=basic
# if you want to enable email verification, uncomment the following
# REQUIRE_EMAIL_VERIFICATION=true
# SMTP_USER=<GMAIL_ACCOUNT_EMAIL_YOU_WANT_TO_SEND_VERIFICATION_EMAILS_WITH>
# SMTP_PASS=<GMAIL_ACCOUNT_PW_YOU_WANT_TO_SEND_VERIFICATION_EMAILS_WITH>

# if you've gone through the Google OAuth setup guide, then comment out
# the above and uncomment the following
# AUTH_TYPE=google_oauth
# GOOGLE_OAUTH_CLIENT_ID=
# GOOGLE_OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRET=
# SECRET=<RANDOMLY_GENERATED_UUID>

GEN_AI_MODEL_PROVIDER=openai
GEN_AI_MODEL_VERSION=gpt-4  # if it's an option, we recommend using gpt-4

# Default values here are what Postgres uses by default, feel free to change.
POSTGRES_USER=postgres
POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password
In the .env.nginx file, put the following: 
DOMAIN=<YOUR_DOMAIN>  # something like "danswer.ai"
Next, let’s get our SSL certificate from letsencrypt. To do this, we can simply run: 
./init-letsencrypt.sh
If are skipping the HTTPS setup, you should start things up with: docker-compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml -p danswer-stack up -d --build --force-recreate instead of the above. You can then access Danswer from the IP address from earlier or from the instance Public IPv4 DNS provided on the instance’s page in the AWS console.
Voila, you’re all done! 🎉 After waiting a few minutes (you can monitor the progress with docker logs danswer-stack-api_server-1 -f; once you see a log for INFO: Application startup complete. then everything should be good to go).