Deploying Dify with Milvus

Dify is an open-source platform designed to simplify building AI applications by combining Backend-as-a-Service with LLMOps. It supports mainstream LLMs, offers an intuitive prompt orchestration interface, high-quality RAG engines, and a flexible AI agent framework. With low-code workflows, easy-to-use interfaces, and APIs, Dify enables both developers and non-technical users to focus on creating innovative, real-world AI solutions without dealing with complexity.

In this tutorial, we will show you how to deploy Dify with Milvus, to enable efficient retrieval and RAG engine.

Clone the Repository

Clone the Dify source code to your local machine:

git clone https://github.com/langgenius/dify.git

Set the Environment Variables

Navigate to the Docker directory in the Dify source code

cd dify/docker

Copy the environment configuration file

cp .env.example .env

Change the value VECTOR_STORE in the .env file

VECTOR_STORE=milvus

Make sure the Milvus configuration in the .env file has the following line:

MILVUS_URI=http://host.docker.internal:19530

Note that by specifying VECTOR_STORE=milvus, Dify will bring up a Milvus Standalone server in docker. Even though you can access the server from outside of the Docker through http://localhost:19530, for other Dify containers to talk to it inside Docker environment, they need to connect to the special DNS name host.docker.internal. Thus we set http://host.docker.internal:19530 as MILVUS_URI.

For production deployment you may want to customize the authentication. For more information about how to set token or username and password in Milvus, you can refer the authenticate page.

Start the Docker Containers

Choose the appropriate command to start the containers based on the Docker Compose version on your system. You can use the $ docker compose version command to check the version, and refer to the Docker documentation for more information:

If you have Docker Compose V2, use the following command:

docker compose up -d

If you have Docker Compose V1, use the following command:

docker compose up -d

Log in to Dify

Open your browser and go to the Dify installation page, and you can set your admin account here: http://localhost/install , And then log in the main Dify page for further usage.

For further usage and guidance, please refer to the Dify documentation.