privateGPT/fern/docs/pages/manual/ingestion.mdx

# Ingesting & Managing Documents

The ingestion of documents can be done in different ways:

* Using the `/ingest` API
* Using the Gradio UI
* Using the Bulk Local Ingestion functionality (check next section)

## Bulk Local Ingestion

When you are running PrivateGPT in a fully local setup, you can ingest a complete folder for convenience (containing
pdf, text files, etc.)
and optionally watch changes on it with the command:

```bash
make ingest /path/to/folder -- --watch
```

To log the processed and failed files to an additional file, use:

```bash
make ingest /path/to/folder -- --watch --log-file /path/to/log/file.log
```

**Note for Windows Users:** Depending on your Windows version and whether you are using PowerShell to execute
PrivateGPT API calls, you may need to include the parameter name before passing the folder path for consumption:

```bash
make ingest arg=/path/to/folder -- --watch --log-file /path/to/log/file.log
```

After ingestion is complete, you should be able to chat with your documents
by navigating to http://localhost:8001 and using the option `Query documents`,
or using the completions / chat API.

## Ingestion troubleshooting

### Running out of memory

To do not run out of memory, you should ingest your documents without the LLM loaded in your (video) memory.
To do so, you should change your configuration to set `llm.mode: mock`.

You can also use the existing `PGPT_PROFILES=mock` that will set the following configuration for you:

```yaml
llm:
  mode: mock
embedding:
  mode: local
```

This configuration allows you to use hardware acceleration for creating embeddings while avoiding loading the full LLM into (video) memory.

Once your documents are ingested, you can set the `llm.mode` value back to `local` (or your previous custom value).

### Ingestion speed

The ingestion speed depends on the number of documents you are ingesting, and the size of each document.
To speed up the ingestion, you can change the ingestion mode in configuration.

The following ingestion mode exist:
* `simple`: historic behavior, ingest one document at a time, sequentially
* `batch`: read, parse, and embed multiple documents using batches (batch read, and then batch parse, and then batch embed)
* `parallel`: read, parse, and embed multiple documents in parallel. This is the fastest ingestion mode for local setup.
* `pipeline`: Alternative to parallel.
To change the ingestion mode, you can use the `embedding.ingest_mode` configuration value. The default value is `simple`.

To configure the number of workers used for parallel or batched ingestion, you can use
the `embedding.count_workers` configuration value. If you set this value too high, you might run out of
memory, so be mindful when setting this value. The default value is `2`.
For `batch` mode, you can easily set this value to your number of threads available on your CPU without
running out of memory. For `parallel` mode, you should be more careful, and set this value to a lower value.

The configuration below should be enough for users who want to stress more their hardware:
```yaml
embedding:
  ingest_mode: parallel
  count_workers: 4
```

If your hardware is powerful enough, and that you are loading heavy documents, you can increase the number of workers.
It is recommended to do your own tests to find the optimal value for your hardware.

If you have a `bash` shell, you can use this set of command to do your own benchmark:

```bash
# Wipe your local data, to put yourself in a clean state
# This will delete all your ingested documents
make wipe

time PGPT_PROFILES=mock python ./scripts/ingest_folder.py ~/my-dir/to-ingest/
```

## Supported file formats

privateGPT by default supports all the file formats that contains clear text (for example, `.txt` files, `.html`, etc.).
However, these text based file formats as only considered as text files, and are not pre-processed in any other way.

It also supports the following file formats:
* `.hwp`
* `.pdf`
* `.docx`
* `.pptx`
* `.ppt`
* `.pptm`
* `.jpg`
* `.png`
* `.jpeg`
* `.mp3`
* `.mp4`
* `.csv`
* `.epub`
* `.md`
* `.mbox`
* `.ipynb`
* `.json`

**Please note the following nuance**: while `privateGPT` supports these file formats, it **might** require additional
dependencies to be installed in your python's virtual environment.
For example, if you try to ingest `.epub` files, `privateGPT` might fail to do it, and will instead display an
explanatory error asking you to download the necessary dependencies to install this file format.


**Other file formats might work**, but they will be considered as plain text
files (in other words, they will be ingested as `.txt` files).