Practical overview
When it fits
Use it when you want to create a self-hosted, citation-producing question-answering service over arXiv papers and can operate its Docker or Python-based components.
Who it is for
- Researchers who want to search and ask questions across a selected set of arXiv papers.
- Developers building a self-hosted RAG API with local model serving.
Documented uses
- Download a limited set of arXiv papers matching a search query.
- Load, chunk, embed and store papers in Qdrant.
- Retrieve relevant passages for a question and return an LLM-generated answer with source citations.
Requirements & limits
- The documented ingestion source is arXiv, and the workflow uses a search query and result limit.
- The Docker Compose stack separates ingestion from the API, vector database and model server.
- The documented query interface is an API endpoint; no separate user-facing application interface is described.
Check current requirements in the official documentation. Source-based guidance does not mean OpenViST has run or independently tested this project.
Set up and ingest papers with Docker Compose
Build the project services, start the API stack and index a limited arXiv search into Qdrant.
Before you start
- Docker and Docker Compose
- The project repository
Steps
Clone the repository and enter its directory.
Build the images with the command below.
docker compose buildStart Ollama, Qdrant and the API with the command below.
docker compose up ollama qdrant apiRun the ingestion service with the command below, changing the search phrase or result limit as needed.
docker compose run data_ingestion --query "LLM" --max 5 --ingest
Expected outcome
The selected arXiv papers are chunked and stored in Qdrant, and the API service is started on port 8000 for queries.
Guide limitations
- This setup requires Docker and Docker Compose.
- The documented ingestion command searches arXiv; it does not describe importing arbitrary local documents.
Sources & review
Source record details
- Source availability
- Active
- Sources checked
- 16 October 2026
- Original website title
- Otman404/local-rag-llamaindex · Official homepage title · retained in its source language

