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Manage OpenRAG containers and services

Service management is an essential part of maintaining your OpenRAG deployment.

Most OpenRAG services run in containers. However, some services, like Docling, run directly on the local machine.

If you installed OpenRAG with the automated installer script, uv, or uvx, you can use the Terminal User Interface (TUI) to manage your OpenRAG configuration and services.

For self-managed deployments, run Docker or Podman commands to manage your OpenRAG services.

Monitor services​

  • TUI Status menu: In the Status menu (3), you can access streaming logs for all OpenRAG services. Select the service you want to view, and then press l. To copy the logs, click Copy to Clipboard.

  • TUI Diagnostics menu: The TUI's Diagnostics menu (4) provides health monitoring for your container runtimes and monitoring of your OpenSearch instance.

  • Docling: See Stop, start, and inspect native services.

Stop and start containers​

In the TUI's Status menu (3), click Stop Services to stop all OpenRAG container-based services. Then, click Start All Services to restart the OpenRAG containers.

When you click Start All Services, the following processes are triggered:

  1. OpenRAG automatically detects your container runtime, and then checks if your machine has compatible GPU support by checking for CUDA, NVIDIA_SMI, and Docker/Podman runtime support. This check determines which Docker Compose file OpenRAG uses because there are separate Docker Compose files for GPU and CPU deployments.

  2. OpenRAG pulls the OpenRAG container images with docker compose pull if any images are missing.

  3. OpenRAG deploys the containers with docker compose up -d.

Stop, start, and inspect native services (Docling)​

A native service in OpenRAG is a service that runs locally on your machine, not within a container. For example, the docling serve process is an OpenRAG native service because this document processing service runs on your local machine, separate from the OpenRAG containers.

From the TUI's Status menu (3), click Native Services to do the following:

  • View the service's status, port, and process ID (PID).
  • Stop, start, and restart native services.

Upgrade services​

See Upgrade OpenRAG.

Reset containers (destructive)​

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This is a destructive operation that does the following:

  • Destroys all OpenRAG containers, volumes, and local images.
  • Prunes any additional container objects.
  • Deletes the contents of the ~/.openrag directory except for OpenRAG's .env file and the /documents subdirectory.

Destroyed containers and deleted data are lost and cannot be recovered after running this operation.

Use these steps to reset your OpenRAG deployment by recreating the containers and deleting all data in the ~/.openrag directory except for the .env file and the /documents subdirectory.

This restores your OpenRAG deployment to a near-initial state while preserving your configuration (in .env) and uploaded documents (in /documents). Your documents are reingested into a fresh OpenSearch index after the reset.

To reset your OpenRAG deployment and delete all OpenRAG data, see Reinstall OpenRAG.

  1. If you modified the built-in flows or created custom flows in your OpenRAG Langflow instance, and you want to preserve those changes, then you must export your flows before starting this process. Afterwards, you can import your flows or reference the exported flow JSON as needed.

  1. To destroy and recreate your OpenRAG containers, open the TUI's Status menu (3), and then click Factory Reset.

  2. Repeat the setup process to restart the services and launch the OpenRAG app. Your OpenRAG passwords, OAuth credentials (if previously set), and onboarding configuration are restored from the .env file.

See also​