Run Prompter locally

Run the full pipeline - ingestion, retrieval, answering, and optionally the Discord bot - on your own machine.

Prerequisites

• .NET SDK 10.0.301 or later
• Docker (for Postgres with pgvector)
• A Voyage AI API key (free tier, required for indexing)
• An Anthropic API key (required for answering)
• Optional: a Discord bot token for a private test server (only for running the bot itself)

Bring up the database

From the repository root:

docker compose up -d

This starts Postgres with the pgvector extension on localhost:5432. The schema is created automatically on first run.

Configure your keys

Set the keys as environment variables (or use a git-ignored Source/appsettings.Development.json - never commit keys):

export Cratis__Prompter__Voyage__ApiKey=<your-voyage-key>
export Cratis__Prompter__Anthropic__ApiKey=<your-anthropic-key>

Index the documentation

cd Source
dotnet run -- index

This walks the cratis.io sitemap, fetches every page’s markdown mirror, chunks and embeds the content, and prints a summary line. A second run reports everything unchanged - only modified content is ever re-embedded.

Ask from the terminal

dotnet run -- ask "How do I append an event in Chronicle?"
dotnet run -- ask "How do I append an event in Chronicle?" --verbose

The --verbose flag prints the retrieved passages with their scores before the answer - useful for judging retrieval quality. The command exits non-zero when Prompter refuses, so it works in scripts.

Run the Discord bot

Create a bot application on a private test server first - the setup steps live in the repository’s Discord integration runbook. Then:

export Cratis__Prompter__Discord__Token=<your-test-bot-token>
dotnet run

The bot connects outward to Discord - no ports, tunnels, or public IP needed - and answers on your test server exactly as it would in production. See Configuration for every setting.