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Troubleshooting

This page provides troubleshooting advice for issues you might encounter when using OpenRAG or contributing to OpenRAG.

OpenSearch fails to start

Check that OPENSEARCH_PASSWORD set in Environment variables meets requirements. The password must contain at least 8 characters, and must contain at least one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, one digit, and one special character that is strong.

OpenRAG fails to start from the TUI with "Operation not supported" error

This error occurs when starting OpenRAG with the TUI in WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux).

The error occurs because OpenRAG is running within a WSL environment, so webbrowser.open() can't launch a browser automatically.

To access the OpenRAG application, open a web browser and enter http://localhost:3000 in the address bar.

Langflow connection issues

Verify the LANGFLOW_SUPERUSER credentials set in Environment variables are correct.

Memory errors

Container out of memory errors

Increase Docker memory allocation or use docker-compose-cpu.yml to deploy OpenRAG.

Podman on macOS memory issues

If you're using Podman on macOS, you may need to increase VM memory on your Podman machine. This example increases the machine size to 8 GB of RAM, which should be sufficient to run OpenRAG.

podman machine stop
podman machine rm
podman machine init --memory 8192 # 8 GB example
podman machine start

Port conflicts

Ensure ports 3000, 7860, 8000, 9200, 5601 are available.

OCR ingestion fails (easyocr not installed)

If Docling ingestion fails with an OCR-related error and mentions easyocr is missing, this is likely due to a stale uv cache.

easyocr is already included as a dependency in OpenRAG's pyproject.toml. Project-managed installations using uv sync and uv run always sync dependencies directly from your pyproject.toml, so they should have easyocr installed.

If you're running OpenRAG with uvx openrag, uvx creates a cached, ephemeral environment that doesn't modify your project. This cache may become stale.

On macOS, this cache directory is typically a user cache directory such as /Users/USER_NAME/.cache/uv.

  1. To clear the uv cache, run:
    uv cache clean
  2. Start OpenRAG:
    uvx openrag

If you do not need OCR, you can disable OCR-based processing in your ingestion settings to avoid requiring easyocr.

Langflow container already exists

If you are running other versions of Langflow containers on your machine, you may encounter an issue where Docker or Podman thinks Langflow is already up.

Remove just the problem container, or clean up all containers and start fresh.

To reset your local containers and pull new images, do the following:

  1. Stop your containers and completely remove them.

    # Stop all running containers
    docker stop $(docker ps -q)

    # Remove all containers (including stopped ones)
    docker rm --force $(docker ps -aq)

    # Remove all images
    docker rmi --force $(docker images -q)

    # Remove all volumes
    docker volume prune --force

    # Remove all networks (except default)
    docker network prune --force

    # Clean up any leftover data
    docker system prune --all --force --volumes
  2. Restart OpenRAG and upgrade to get the latest images for your containers.

    uv sync
    uv run openrag
  3. In the OpenRAG TUI, click Status, and then click Upgrade. When the Close button is active, the upgrade is complete. Close the window and open the OpenRAG appplication.