Your team has documents everywhere — contracts, reports, runbooks, research papers — and finding answers means either manually digging through files or paying for a hosted AI service that ingests your sensitive data.
Hosted document AI tools are expensive, opaque, and require you to hand over your files to a third party. Building your own RAG pipeline from scratch means weeks of engineering work just to get a working prototype.
Aktilot fills that gap. It's a self-hosted, open-source platform that lets you upload your documents and ask questions in plain English — in minutes, not weeks, with your data staying exactly where it is.
Organize your knowledge into projects. Group documents by team, client, or use case. Each project gets its own isolated vector store, so a query against your legal documents never bleeds into your engineering runbooks.
Create AI agents that know their role.
Each agent has a configurable system prompt, persona, and retrieval depth (top_k). Your customer-facing support bot and your internal audit agent can live in the same project and behave completely differently.
Upload any document — PDF, Word, or plain text. Drop in a file and Aktilot handles the rest: splitting it into overlapping chunks, embedding each chunk via OpenAI, and indexing it into ChromaDB. The UI shows you live processing status so you always know where a file stands.
Ask questions, get answers with sources. Every response includes the exact document chunks it was built from — filename, chunk position, and relevance score. No hallucination hiding behind a confident tone; you can trace every answer back to a sentence.
See every step of the retrieval pipeline. The UI exposes the full pipeline trace for each query: which keywords were extracted, how many candidates came back from vector search, how they were re-ranked, what context was assembled, and how long each step took. Nothing is a black box.
Resilient by design — not by accident. Document ingestion and chat both run as durable Temporal workflows. Every activity is checkpointed. If OpenAI rate-limits you mid-pipeline, only the failed step retries automatically — the work already done is not repeated and no API credits are wasted.
Runs entirely on your infrastructure. Postgres, ChromaDB, and the worker all run in Docker. Your documents never leave your network. You control the OpenAI key, the storage, and the retention policy.
Aktilot uses a hybrid BM25 + vector retrieval approach — combining keyword overlap scoring with semantic similarity — which consistently outperforms pure vector search on precise factual questions like dates, names, and figures.
All three workflows run on a Temporal Cluster for durable, individually-retryable execution:
- DocumentWorkflow — chunks, embeds, and indexes uploaded files into ChromaDB. Metadata is stored in Postgres.
- ChatWorkflow — hybrid BM25 + vector retrieval, LLM answer generation, and conversation persistence. Each step is checkpointed; a failed OpenAI call retries alone without re-running earlier steps.
- BenchmarkWorkflow (coming soon) — evaluates retrieval quality with Recall@K, MRR, and latency metrics, storing results in an evaluation DB.
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The fastest way to run Aktilot is with Docker Compose. You need an OpenAI API key and Docker installed.
git clone https://github.com/vikas0686/aktilot.git
cd aktilot
cp .env.example .env
# Open .env and set: OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...
docker compose up --build| Service | URL | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| App | http://localhost:3000 | Main UI |
| Backend API | http://localhost:8000 | REST API + OpenAPI docs at /docs |
| Temporal UI | http://localhost:8233 | Workflow execution history and retries |
| Grafana | http://localhost:3002 | Observability dashboards (admin / admin) |
| Prometheus | http://localhost:9090 | Metrics query engine |
That's it. Create a project, upload a PDF, create an agent, and start asking questions.
The Temporal UI at :8233 lets you monitor document processing jobs, inspect individual pipeline steps, and retry failed uploads without re-uploading the file.
Prerequisites: Python 3.12+, Node 20+, Docker (for Postgres + Temporal)
Backend
cd backend
python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
cp .env.example .env # set OPENAI_API_KEY and DATABASE_URL
# Start Postgres and Temporal via Docker
docker compose up postgres temporal -d
alembic upgrade head
# Terminal 1 — API server
uvicorn main:app --reload --port 8000
# Terminal 2 — Temporal worker (processes document uploads)
python -m temporal.workerFrontend
cd frontend
npm install
npm run dev # http://localhost:5173Tests
# Backend
cd backend && source .venv/bin/activate
pytest --tb=short -q
# Frontend
cd frontend && npm test| Variable | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|
OPENAI_API_KEY |
Yes | Your OpenAI API key |
DATABASE_URL |
Yes | PostgreSQL connection string (asyncpg) |
TEMPORAL_ADDRESS |
No | Temporal server address (default: localhost:7233) |
CHAT_MODEL |
No | Chat model to use (default: gpt-4o-mini) |
EMBEDDING_MODEL |
No | Embedding model (default: text-embedding-3-small) |
UPLOAD_DIR |
No | Where uploaded files are stored (default: uploads) |
CHROMA_DIR |
No | Where vector data is persisted (default: chroma_data) |
Copy .env.example to .env in the project root (for Docker) or backend/.env (for local dev).
Aktilot ships with a full observability stack — metrics, traces, and 7 pre-built Grafana dashboards covering LLM performance, retrieval quality, token costs, prompt intelligence, vector database health, and Temporal workflow execution.
See OBSERVABILITY.md for the full dashboard guide, metrics reference, and service URLs.
We welcome contributions of all kinds — bug fixes, new features, documentation improvements, and feedback.
Read CONTRIBUTING.md for how to set up your dev environment, our branching workflow, code standards, and how to submit a pull request.
If you've found a bug, open an issue. If you have a feature idea, start a discussion before writing code.
For security vulnerabilities, please do not open a public issue — see SECURITY.md.
MIT © Vikas Pandey