Adding generative Q&A for your documentation

Learn how to build a ChatGPT-style doc search powered using our headless search toolkit.

Supabase provides a Headless Search Toolkit for adding "Generative Q&A" to your documentation. The toolkit is "headless", so that you can integrate it into your existing website and style it to match your website theme.

You can see how this works with the Supabase docs. Just hit cmd+k and "ask" for something like "what are the features of supabase?". You will see that the response is streamed back, using the information provided in the docs:

Tech stack#

Supabase: Database & Edge Functions.
OpenAI: Embeddings and completions.
GitHub Actions: for ingesting your markdown docs.

Toolkit#

This toolkit consists of 2 parts:

The Headless Vector Search template which you can deploy in your own organization.
A GitHub Action which will ingest your markdown files, convert them to embeddings, and store them in your database.

Usage#

There are 3 steps to build similarity search inside your documentation:

Prepare your database.
Ingest your documentation.
Add a search interface.

Prepare your database#

To prepare, create a new Supabase project and store the database and API credentials, which you can find in the project settings.

Now we can use the Headless Vector Search instructions to set up the database:

Clone the repo to your local machine: git clone git@github.com:supabase/headless-vector-search.git
Link the repo to your remote project: supabase link --project-ref XXX
Apply the database migrations: supabase db push
Set your OpenAI key as a secret: supabase secrets set OPENAI_KEY=sk-xxx
Deploy the Edge Functions: supabase functions deploy --no-verify-jwt
Expose docs schema via API in Supabase Dashboard settings > API Settings > Exposed schemas

Ingest your documentation#

Now we need to push your documentation into the database as embeddings. You can do this manually, but to make it easier we've created a GitHub Action which can update your database every time there is a Pull Request.

In your knowledge base repository, create a new action called .github/workflows/generate_embeddings.yml with the following content:

name: 'generate_embeddings'
on: # run on main branch changes
  push:
    branches:
      - main
jobs:
  generate:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - uses: supabase/supabase-embeddings-generator@v0.0.x # Update this to the latest version.
        with:
          supabase-url: 'https://your-project-ref.supabase.co' # Update this to your project URL.
          supabase-service-role-key: ${{ secrets.SUPABASE_SERVICE_ROLE_KEY }}
          openai-key: ${{ secrets.OPENAI_KEY }}
          docs-root-path: 'docs' # the path to the root of your md(x) files

Make sure to choose the latest version, and set your SUPABASE_SERVICE_ROLE_KEY and OPENAI_KEY as repository secrets in your repo settings (settings > secrets > actions).

Add a search interface#

Now inside your docs, you need to create a search interface. Because this is a headless interface, you can use it with any language. The only requirement is that you send the user query to the query Edge Function, which will stream an answer back from OpenAI. It might look something like this:

const onSubmit = (e: Event) => {
  e.preventDefault()
  answer.value = ""
  isLoading.value = true
  const query = new URLSearchParams({ query: inputRef.current!.value })
  const projectUrl = `https://your-project-ref.supabase.co/functions/v1`
  const queryURL = `${projectURL}/${query}`
  const eventSource = new EventSource(queryURL)
  eventSource.addEventListener("error", (err) => {
    isLoading.value = false
    console.error(err)
  })
  eventSource.addEventListener("message", (e: MessageEvent) => {
    isLoading.value = false
    if (e.data === "[DONE]") {
      eventSource.close()
      return
    }
    const completionResponse: CreateCompletionResponse = JSON.parse(e.data)
    const text = completionResponse.choices[0].text
    answer.value += text
  });
  isLoading.value = true
}

Resources#

Read about how we built ChatGPT for the Supabase Docs.
Read the pgvector Docs for Embeddings and vector similarity
See how to build something like this from scratch using Next.js.

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