/bookgpt

Primary LanguageRuby

BookGPT

A Rails + React adaptation of Ask My Book.

BookGPT uses Retrieval Augmented Generation to answer questions about The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick.

Check it out at https://book-gpt-yjbf.onrender.com/.

Tech stack

  • Back-end - Rails
  • Front-end - React and TypeScript
  • Database - Postgres
  • Hosting/Platform-as-a-Service - Render

Local setup

First, install and run Postgres and its pgvector extension. Eg on OSX:

  1. brew install postgresql pgvector
  2. brew services start postgresql

On Apple's new ARM machines you may need to build the Postgres C client library libpq from source and tell bundler where to find the corresponding config file when installing the pg gem:

  1. brew install libpq --build-from-source
  2. Find the path to libpq: find /opt/homebrew/Cellar -name pg_config | grep libpq
  3. bundle config build.pg --with-pg-config=/opt/homebrew/Cellar/libpq/16.1_1/bin/pg_config

Then:

  1. git clone git@github.com:Murphydbuffalo/bookgpt.git
  2. cd bookgpt
  3. touch .env and add your OpenAI API key to it as OPENAI_API_KEY.
  4. bundle
  5. bundle exec rails db:create
  6. bundle exec rails db:migrate
  7. npm install
  8. In a rails console or via rails runner run BookPassage.import!(filepath: path_to_pdf_of_book) to generate and store the embeddings of the book passages.
  9. In one process: bundle exec rails server
  10. In another: ./bin/vite dev to watch the front-end files for changes and compile them on the fly. You can also run ./bin/vite build to build the assets in the same way they'll be built on prod (via esbuild, walking the entire module graph, rather than doing incremental updates).
  11. Visit localhost:3000

If everything worked you're now ready to ask questions about The Mom Test!

TypeScript

Run npm tsc --noEmit --watch to run the type checker. Because Vite is not designed to crawl the entire module graph during development they intentionally did not include the capability for the dev server to run type checking:

Note that Vite only performs transpilation on .ts files and does NOT perform type checking. It assumes type checking is taken care of by your IDE and build process.

The reason Vite does not perform type checking as part of the transform process is because the two jobs work fundamentally differently. Transpilation can work on a per-file basis and aligns perfectly with Vite's on-demand compile model. In comparison, type checking requires knowledge of the entire module graph. Shoe-horning type checking into Vite's transform pipeline will inevitably compromise Vite's speed benefits.

Given that, we have to run our own tsc command to get type checking.