📮 Redbox Copilot

Important

Incubation Project: This project is an incubation project; as such, we DON’T recommend using it in any critical use case. This project is in active development and a work in progress. This project may one day Graduate, in which case this disclaimer will be removed.

Redbox Copilot is a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) app that uses GenAI to chat with and summarise civil service documents. It's designed to handle a variety of administrative sources, such as letters, briefings, minutes, and speech transcripts.

• Better retrieval. Redbox Copilot increases organisational memory by indexing documents
• Faster, accurate summarisation. Redbox Copilot can summarise reports read months ago, supplement them with current work, and produce a first draft that lets civil servants focus on what they do best

Local Dev Setup

The entire architecture runs in docker compose for local development. This includes locally hosting the app, databases, object store and orchestration. Therefore, you will need docker installed.

First time setup

You will need to create a copy of the .env.example file as .env to store your secrets, such as your Anthropic API key (ask the team for the keys). The .env file should not be committed to GitHub.

If you have issues with permissions, you may need to run chmod 777 data/elastic/ to be able to write to the folder.

To run

You can simply run:

docker compose up or make run

You'll find a series of useful docker compose commands already maded in Makefile

Any time you update code for the the repo, you'll likely need to rebuild the containers.

Docs

The docs are built using MkDocs. To run the docs locally, you can run:

make docs-serve

Codespace

For a quick start, you can use GitHub Codespaces to run the project in a cloud-based development environment. Click the button below to open the project in a new Codespace.

Development

You will need to install poppler and tesseract to run the ingester

• brew install poppler

• brew install tesseract

• Download and install pre-commit to benefit from pre-commit hooks

  • pip install pre-commit
  • pre-commit install

Testing

• Unit tests and QA run in CI
• At this time integration test(s) take 10+ mins to run so are triggered manually in CI

Dependencies

This project uses a microservice architecture.

Each microservice runs in its own container defined by a Dockerfile.

For every microservice that we have written in python we define its dependencies using https://python-poetry.org/.

This means that our project is structured approximately like this:

redbox-copilot/
├── frontend/
├── django_app
│  ├── app/
│  ├── static/
│  ├── tests/
│  ├── manage.py
│  └── Dockerfile
├── embedder
│  ├── src/
│  │  └── worker.py
│  ├── tests/
│  └── Dockerfile
├── ingester
│  ├── src/
│  │  └── worker.py
│  ├── tests/
│  └── Dockerfile
├── redbox/
│  ├── exceptions/
│  ├── export/
│  ├── llm/
│  ├── models/
│  ├── parsing/
│  ├── storage
│  ├── tests/
│  └── Dockerfile
├── docker-compose.yaml
├── pyproject.toml
├── Makefile
└── README.md

Contributing

We welcome contributions to this project. Please see the CONTRIBUTING.md file for more information.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

Security

If you discover a security vulnerability within this project, please follow our Security Policy.

Troubleshooting

Error: Elasticsearch 137

ERROR: Elasticsearch exited unexpectedly, with exit code 137

This is caused by Elasticsearch not having enough memory.

Increase total memory available to 8gb.

colima down
colima start --memory 8

Error: Docker... no space left on device

docker: /var/lib/... no space left on device

This is caused by your own laptop being too full to create a new image.

Clear out old docker artefacts:

docker system prune --all --force

Frontend

CSS

We depend on govuk-frontend for GOV.UK Design System styles.

npm install

Once this has been done, django-compressor should work automatically to compile the govuk-frontend SCSS on the first request and any subsequent request after the SCSS has changed. In the meantime it will read from frontend/CACHE, which is .gitignored.

When we get to production, we can prepopulate frontend/CACHE using manage.py compress before building our container, which will mean that every request will be served from the cache.

django-compressor also takes care of fingerprinting and setting cache headers for our CSS so it can be cached.

Fonts and images

The govuk assets are versioned in the npm package. On initial app setup you will need to run poetry run python manage.py collectstatic to copy them to the frontend folder from where runserver can serve them.

We’ll revisit this process when we deploy the app.