Configuring Self-Hosted Vrite

To properly host Vrite, you first have to configure a couple of environment variables. This guide aims to give you an overview of the available options.

Security

Providing a strong SECRET is important, as it’s the value used to encrypt JSON Web Tokens. You can generate one from the terminal with:

openssl rand -base64 32

Cookies

The optional COOKIE_DOMAIN variable is used to set the Domain attribute for session cookies. If you make your Vrite services accessible at different subdomains (e.g. api.vrite.io, app.vrite.io, etc.) it’s important to set COOKIE_DOMAIN to your top domain, like vrite.io, for the necessary cookies to be accessible to all services.

Email

Vrite uses email to handle registrations, magic link logins, and important verification messages. You have to configure email to be able to sign into your Vrite instance.

There are two email configuration options available:

• SMTP — sends emails through SMTP, compatible with most email providers;
• SendGrid — sends emails through SendGrid API;

For both, configure the SENDER_EMAIL and SENDGER_NAME variables.

Then, depending on the option you choose, configure the following:

# Email (SMTP)
SMTP_HOST=
SMTP_PORT=
SMTP_USERNAME=
SMTP_PASSWORD=
SMTP_SECURE=

# Email (SendGrid)
SENDGRID_API_KEY=

S3

Vrite stores uploaded images using the S3. For local development, can use the S3 configuration provided in .env.example file, for connecting to MinIO as set up in the docker-compose.yml file.

For production, make sure to either secure and properly configure your MinIO instance, or use an S3-compatible service — pretty much all should work.

GitHub OAuth2

If you want to add Sign in with GitHub option to your authentication page, make sure to provide the GITHUB_CLIENT_ID and GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET variables. Follow the official guide to acquire the values. Use {{PUBLIC_APP_URL}}/login/github/callback for your Authorization callback URL.

When the variables are not provided, the GitHub sign-in will be disabled.

GitHub App

To enable Git sync and synchronize your content from your GitHub repo, you’ll have to provide credentials for your GitHub App. To obtain them, follow the official guide (use {{PUBLIC_APP_URL}}/github/callback for your Callback URL) and then fill out the variables:

# GitHub App (optional - GitHub Git sync)
GITHUB_APP_ID=
GITHUB_APP_PRIVATE_KEY=
GITHUB_APP_CLIENT_ID=
GITHUB_APP_CLIENT_SECRET=

When the variables are not provided, the Git sync feature will be disabled.

Weaviate

Vrite uses Weaviate to power its built-in semantic search. To enable it, you’ll have to provide WEAVIATE_URL and WEAVIATE_API_KEY variables, for Vrite to connect to your Weaviate instance.

Your Weaviate instance has to be properly configured to work with Vrite:

• It has to have API Key authentication enabled;
• It has to have a default vectorizer module set;
• If the vectorizer isn’t text2vec-openai or OpenAI isn’t configured in Vrite, you have to provide proper configuration right inside your Weaviate instance, for the default vectorizer to work;

You can use the weaviate service from docker-compose.yml as a reference for basic setup with OpenAI vectorizer.

When the variables are not provided, the search and AI question-answering features will be disabled.

OpenAI

To enable AI question-answering, you have to configure both Weaviate and OpenAI. For the latter, you have to provide OPENAI_API_KEY and OPENAI_ORGANIZATION variables. You can find them in your OpenAI dashboard.

The OPENAI_API_KEY will be automatically forwarded to your Weaviate instance to simplify the use of text2vec-openai vectorizer.

When the variables are not provided, the AI question-answering feature will be disabled.