File: README.md
Haystack is an open-source AI orchestration framework for building production-ready LLM applications in Python.
Design modular pipelines and agent workflows with explicit control over retrieval, routing, memory, and generation. Build scalable RAG systems, multimodal applications, semantic search, question answering, and autonomous agents, all in a transparent architecture that lets you experiment, customize deeply, and deploy with confidence.
Table of Contents
- Installation
- Documentation
- Features
- Haystack Enterprise: Support & Platform
- Telemetry
- π Community
- Contributing to Haystack
- Organizations using Haystack
Installation
The simplest way to get Haystack is via pip:
pip install haystack-aiInstall nightly pre-releases to try the newest features:
pip install --pre haystack-aiHaystack supports multiple installation methods, including Docker images. For a comprehensive guide, please refer
to the documentation.
Documentation
If you're new to the project, check out "What is Haystack?" then go
through the "Get Started Guide" and build your first LLM application
in a matter of minutes. Keep learning with the tutorials. For more advanced
use cases, or just to get some inspiration, you can browse our Haystack recipes in the
Cookbook.
At any given point, hit the documentation to learn more about Haystack, what it can do for you, and the technology behind.
Features
Agents built for production
Extend agent behavior with lifecycle hooks (before_llm, before_tool, on_exit, β¦) for guardrails and custom logic, and track step_count, token_usage, and tool calls out of the box for monitoring and cost control. Get started fast with ready-made agents from Agent Pack (e.g., a deep research agent, or an advanced RAG agent) or give your own agents progressive skill discovery via SkillToolset, so skill descriptions only enter context when needed.
Built for context engineering
Design flexible systems with explicit control over how information is retrieved, ranked, filtered, combined, structured, and routed before it reaches the model. Define pipelines and agent workflows where retrieval, memory, tools, and generation are transparent and traceable.
Native Async Support
One Pipeline runs synchronously or asynchronously and streams token by token. Agent can run concurrent tool calls.
Modular and customizable
Use built-in components for retrieval, indexing, tool calling, memory, and evaluation, or create your own. Add loops, branches, and conditional logic to precisely control how context moves through your pipelines and agent workflows.
Model- and vendor-agnostic
Integrate with OpenAI, Mistral, Anthropic, Cohere, Hugging Face, Google, Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, local models, and many others. Swap models or infrastructure components without rewriting your system.
Extensible ecosystem
Build and share custom components through a consistent interface that makes it easy for the community and third parties to extend Haystack and contribute to an open ecosystem.
[!TIP]
Would you like to deploy and serve Haystack pipelines as REST APIs or MCP servers? Hayhooks provides a simple way for you to wrap pipelines and agents with custom logic and expose them through HTTP endpoints or MCP. It also supports OpenAI-compatible chat completion endpoints and works with chat UIs like open-webui.
Haystack Enterprise: Support & Platform
Get expert support from the Haystack team, build faster with enterprise-grade templates, and scale securely with deployment guides for cloud and on-prem environments with Haystack Enterprise Starter. Read more about it in the announcement post.
π Get Haystack Enterprise Starter
Need a managed production setup for Haystack? The Haystack Enterprise Platform helps you build, test, deploy and operate Haystack pipelines with built-in observability, collaboration, governance, and access controls. Itβs available as a managed cloud service or as a self-hosted solution.
π Learn more about Haystack Enterprise Platform or try it free
Telemetry
Haystack collects anonymous usage statistics of pipeline components. We receive an event every time these components are initialized. This way, we know which components are most relevant to our community.
Read more about telemetry in Haystack or how you can opt out in Haystack docs.
π Community
If you have a feature request or a bug report, feel free to open an issue in GitHub. We regularly check these, so you can expect a quick response. If you'd like to discuss a topic or get more general advice on how to make Haystack work for your project, you can start a thread in Github Discussions or our Discord channel. We also check π (Twitter) and Stack Overflow.
Contributing to Haystack
We are very open to the community's contributions - be it a quick fix of a typo, or a completely new feature! You don't need to be a Haystack expert to provide meaningful improvements. To learn how to get started, check out our Contributor Guidelines first.
There are several ways you can contribute to Haystack:
- Contribute to the main Haystack project
- Contribute an integration on haystack-core-integrations
- Contribute to the documentation in haystack/docs-website
[!TIP]
π Check out the full list of issues that are open to contributions
Organizations using Haystack
Haystack is used by thousands of teams building production AI systems across industries, including:
- Technology & AI Infrastructure: Apple, Meta, Databricks, NVIDIA, Intel
- Public Sector AI Initiatives: European Commission, German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space (BMFTR), PD, Baden-WΓΌrttemberg State
- Enterprise & Industrial AI Applications: Airbus, Lufthansa Industry Solutions, Infineon, LEGO, Comcast, Accenture, TELUS Agriculture & Consumer Goods
- Knowledge & Content Platforms: Netflix, ZEIT Online, Rakuten, Oxford University Press, Manz, YPulse
Are you also using Haystack? Open a PR or tell us your story
File: docker/README.md
Haystack is an end-to-end LLM framework that allows you to build applications powered by LLMs, Transformer models, vector search and more. Whether you want to perform retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), document search, question answering or answer generation, Haystack can orchestrate state-of-the-art embedding models and LLMs into pipelines to build end-to-end NLP applications and solve your use case.
Haystack 2.x
For the latest version of Haystack there's only one image available:
haystack:base-<version>contains a working Python environment with Haystack preinstalled. This image is expected to
be derivedFROM.
Image Development
Images are built with BuildKit and we use bake to orchestrate the process.
You can build a specific image by running:
docker buildx bake baseYou can override any variable defined in the docker-bake.hcl file and build custom
images, for example if you want to use a branch from the Haystack repo, run:
HAYSTACK_VERSION=mybranch_or_tag BASE_IMAGE_TAG_SUFFIX=latest docker buildx bake base --no-cacheMulti-Platform Builds
Haystack images support multiple architectures. But depending on your operating system and Docker
environment, you might not be able to build all of them locally.
You may encounter the following error when trying to build the image:
multiple platforms feature is currently not supported for docker driver. Please switch to a different driver
(eg. βdocker buildx create --useβ)To get around this, you need to override the platform option and limit local builds to the same architecture as
your computer's. For example, on an Apple M1 you can limit the builds to ARM only by invoking bake like this:
docker buildx bake base --set "*.platform=linux/arm64"License
View license information for
the software contained in this image.
As with all Docker images, these likely also contain other software which may be under
other licenses (such as Bash, etc from the base distribution, along with any direct or
indirect dependencies of the primary software being contained).
As for any pre-built image usage, it is the image user's responsibility to ensure that any
use of this image complies with any relevant licenses for all software contained within.
File: examples/README.md
Examples have been moved!
If you're searching for Haystack examples we moved them into a dedicated repository.
You can find all the example cookbooks π here π.