ChainForge/GUIDE.md

Installation Guide

For casual users

The simplest and safest way to install the latest public build of ChainForge is to:

1. Create a new directory and cd into it
2. (Optional, but recommended!) Create a virtual environment. On Mac, you can do

   python -m venv venv
   source venv/bin/activate
   

3. Install chainforge via pip:

   pip install chainforge
   

4. Make sure you have OpenAI or Anthropic API keys set as environment variables. For more info, see below.
5. Run

   chainforge serve
   

6. Open localhost:8000 on a recent version of Google Chrome.

Note

ChainForge alpha is tested on Google Chrome. It currently does not work in earlier versions of Safari. We recommend you open it in Chrome.

Activate OpenAI / Anthropic / Google PaLM API keys or install Dalai

Though you can run Chainforge, you can't do anything with it without an API key to call an LLM. If you're just messing around, we recommend you input the API keys manually via the Settings button in the top-right corner.

Currently we support OpenAI models GPT3.5 and GPT4, Anthropic model Claudev1, Google PaLM model text-bison-001, and (locally run) Dalai-served Alpaca.7b at port 4000.

OpenAI

To use OpenAI models, you need to set an environment variable with your OpenAI key: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/5112595-best-practices-for-api-key-safety

For Mac, for instance, follow:

echo "export OPENAI_API_KEY='yourkey'" >> ~/.zshrc
source ~/.zshrc
echo $OPENAI_API_KEY

Then, reopen your terminal.

Anthropic

For Anthropic's API key on Mac, do the same as above but with ANTHROPIC_API_KEY replaced for OpenAI_API_KEY.

Alpaca 7B with Dalai

For Dalai, install dalai and follow the instructions to download alpaca.7b. When everything is setup, run:

npx dalai serve 4000

---

For developers

Below is a guide to running the alpha version of ChainForge directly, for people who want to modify, develop or extend it. Note that these steps may change in the future.

Install requirements

Before you can run ChainForge, you need to install dependencies. cd into chainforge and run

pip install -r requirements.txt

to install requirements. (Ideally, you will run this in a virtualenv.)

To install Node.js requirements, first make sure you have Node.js installed. Then cd into chainforge/react-server and run:

npm install

Serving ChainForge manually

To serve ChainForge manually, you have two options:

1. Run everything from a single Python script, which requires building the React app to static files, or
2. Serve the React front-end separately from the Flask back-end and take advantage of React hot reloading.

We recommend the former option for end-users, and the latter for developers.

Option 1: Build React app as static files (end-users)

cd into react-server directory and run:

npm run build

Wait a moment while it builds the React app to static files.

Option 2: Serve React front-end with hot reloading (developers)

cd into react-server directory and run the following to serve the React front-end:

npm run start

Serving the backend

Regardless of which option you chose, cd into the root ChainForge directory and run:

python -m chainforge.app serve

Note

You can add the --dummy-responses flag in case you're worried about making calls to OpenAI. This will spoof all LLM responses as random strings, and is great for testing the interface without accidentally spending $$.

This script spins up two servers, the main one on port 8000 and a SocketIO server on port 8001 (used for streaming progress updates).

If you built the React app statically, go to localhost:8000 in a web browser to view the app (ideally in Google Chrome). If you served the React app with hot reloading with npm run start, go to the server address you ran it on (usually localhost:3000).

Problems?

Open an Issue.

Contributing to ChainForge

If you want to contribute, welcome! Please fork this repository and submit a Pull Request with your changes.

If you have access to the main repository, we request that you add a branch dev/<your_first_name> and develop changes from there. When you are ready to push changes, say to address an open Issue, make a Pull Request on the experimental repository and assign the main developer (Ian Arawjo) to it.