Installation

This walks you from a clean machine to a working instance — backend, all supporting services, and the dashboard.

Clone the repository.

git clone https://github.com/insight-source/insight-engine.git
cd insight-engine

Start the platform.
Terminal window
```
docker compose up -d
```
The first start downloads several container images (a few GB) and builds the backend — expect it to take a few minutes. Subsequent starts are fast.

By default the backend listens on port 8000 and the bundled Samba test server on port 445. To change either:
Terminal window
```
BACKEND_PORT=8000 SAMBA_PORT=1445 docker compose up -d
```
Verify the backend is up.
Terminal window
```
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" http://localhost:8000/docs
# → 200
```
http://localhost:8000/docs also serves the interactive API explorer in a browser.

On the very first boot the backend can restart once or twice while PostgreSQL and the other services finish initializing — this is normal. Check progress with docker compose ps and docker compose logs -f backend.
Start the dashboard.

The React frontend runs with Node:
Terminal window
```
cd frontend
npm install
VITE_BACKEND_URL=http://localhost:8000/api/v1 npm run dev
```
Open http://localhost:5173 in your browser. The backend’s CORS configuration allows localhost:5173 out of the box; if you serve the frontend from a different origin, see configuration.

For a production-style deployment, build static files with npm run build and serve dist/ behind a web server (e.g. nginx) that also proxies /api/ to the backend.
Create your account.

Visit the dashboard, choose Sign Up, and register — the first account is created the same way as any other; there is no separate admin setup.
Pull your first model.

In the dashboard go to Models → Create Model and enter a model tag from the Ollama library. For a quick CPU test, tinyllama:latest (~640 MB) downloads fast; for real answers on capable hardware, start with something like llama3.2.
Connect data and chat.

From here, everything works exactly as described in the rest of these docs — follow the quickstart. If you don’t have an SMB share handy, the bundled Samba service is preloaded for testing: connect a data source with username testuser, password testpass, remote system name SAMBA, IP address samba, and port 445.

Ports at a glance

Port	Service	Notes
8000	Backend API	Configurable via `BACKEND_PORT`
5173	Dashboard (dev server)	Configurable via `--port`
445	Bundled Samba test server	Configurable via `SAMBA_PORT`

Everything else (PostgreSQL, Weaviate, Ollama, Redis, Tika) stays on the internal Docker network and is not exposed to the host.