You can use GCP Google Compute Engines (VM Instance) to deploy Danswer. The steps are very similar to deploying on AWS EC2. Before we get started, make sure you have an account with Google Cloud Platform and have the necessary permissions to create a VM instance. Feel free to reach out to us via the links on our Contact Us page for more individual help.

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Getting an Instance

Steps to create a VM instance from Google Cloud Console:

  1. Go to the Google Cloud Console Dashboard to create a VM Instance
  2. Select an existing project or create a new one under your organization.
  3. For instance configuration for DANSWER, we recommend at least 16GB of RAM, 4-8vCPU cores, and 500GB of disk for a small-mid sized organization (< 5000 users). You can choose the machine type as per your requirements. For reference, in our Cloud offering we use a e2-standard-4 with 500GB of EBS storage. For more details on GCP instances, you can refer to the GCP documentation.
  4. Make sure to allow HTTPS traffic in the firewall settings and valid scopes for the instance.

For the below guide, we will assume that you’ve chosen to use GCP Debian GNU/Linux machine with the recommended e2-standard-4 instance. For more details, you can follow the steps in the GCP documentation to create a VM instance.

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Pointing your Domain to the Instance

Next, we should point your domain to the VM instance we just created. To do this, we need to go to your DNS and add two records. For this guide, I’ll be assuming your DNS provider is GoDaddy, but it should be almost exactly the same for any DNS provider.

If you don’t have a domain to use yet, then you can either buy one from a DNS provider like GoDaddy or just skip HTTPS for now.

First, we need to grab the External IP address of the instance. You can get that from the VM Instance list page on GCP Console.

Finally, we need to head to the DNS provider and add two entries into the DNS:

The first record directs traffic to that domain to your GCP VM instance. The second record will handle www.<YOUR_DOMAIN> and ensure that this also takes the user to your VM instance.

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Installing Dependencies

Next, we need to prepare the instance so we can actually get Danswer up and running. To do this, you’ll need three things: git, docker, and docker compose. For Debian Linux 12, this can be done with the following:

sudo yum update -y

sudo yum install docker -y
sudo service docker start

sudo curl -L https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/latest/download/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m) -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

sudo yum install git

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Starting up Danswer

Now that we have everything we need we can startup Danswer.

First, let’s clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/danswer-ai/danswer.git

Next, let’s set the necessary env variables:

cd danswer/deployment/docker_compose
touch .env
touch .env.nginx

In the .env file, you can copy past the following (filling in the missing fields as needed):

WEB_DOMAIN=<YOUR_DOMAIN>  # something like "danswer.ai"

# if your email is something like "chris@danswer.ai", then this should be "danswer.ai"
# this prevents people outside your company from creating an account
VALID_EMAIL_DOMAINS=<YOUR_COMPANIES_EMAIL_DOMAIN>

AUTH_TYPE=basic
# if you want to enable email verification, uncomment the following
# REQUIRE_EMAIL_VERIFICATION=true
# SMTP_USER=<GMAIL_ACCOUNT_EMAIL_YOU_WANT_TO_SEND_VERIFICATION_EMAILS_WITH>
# SMTP_PASS=<GMAIL_ACCOUNT_PW_YOU_WANT_TO_SEND_VERIFICATION_EMAILS_WITH>

# if you've gone through the Google OAuth setup guide, then comment out
# the above and uncomment the following
# AUTH_TYPE=google_oauth
# GOOGLE_OAUTH_CLIENT_ID=
# GOOGLE_OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRET=
# SECRET=<RANDOMLY_GENERATED_UUID>

GEN_AI_MODEL_PROVIDER=openai
GEN_AI_MODEL_VERSION=gpt-4  # if it's an option, we recommend using gpt-4

# Default values here are what Postgres uses by default, feel free to change.
POSTGRES_USER=postgres
POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password

In the .env.nginx file, put the following:

DOMAIN=<YOUR_DOMAIN>  # something like "danswer.ai"

Next, let’s get our SSL certificate from letsencrypt. To do this, we can simply run:

./init-letsencrypt.sh

If are skipping the HTTPS setup, you should start things up with: docker-compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml -p danswer-stack up -d --build --force-recreate instead of the above. You can then access Danswer from the IP address from earlier or from the instance External IP provided on the instance’s page in the GCP VM console.

Voila, you’re all done! 🎉

After waiting a few minutes (you can monitor the progress with docker logs danswer-stack-api_server-1 -f; once you see a log for INFO: Application startup complete. then everything should be good to go).

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