The NeMo Guardrails toolkit enables you to create guardrails configurations and deploy them scalable and securely using a guardrails server and an actions server.
The Guardrails Server loads a predefined set of guardrails configurations at startup and exposes an HTTP API to use them. The server uses FastAPI, and the interface is based on the chatbot-ui project. This server is best suited to provide a visual interface/ playground to interact with the bot and try out the rails.
To launch the server:
> nemoguardrails server [--config PATH/TO/CONFIGS] [--port PORT] [--prefix PREFIX] [--disable-chat-ui] [--auto-reload]
If no --config
option is specified, the server will try to load the configurations from the config
folder in the current directory. If no configurations are found, it will load all the example guardrails configurations.
If a --prefix
option is specified, the root path for the guardrails server will be at the specified prefix.
Note: Since the server is designed to server multiple guardrails configurations, the path/to/configs
must be a folder with sub-folders for each individual config. For example:
.
├── config
│ ├── config_1
│ │ ├── file_1.co
│ │ └── config.yml
│ ├── config_2
│ ├── ...
│ ...
Note: If the server is pointed to a folder with a single configuration, then only that configuration will be available.
If the --auto-reload
option is specified, the server will monitor any changes to the files inside the folder holding the configurations and reload them automatically when they change. This allows you to iterate faster on your configurations, and even regenerate messages mid-conversation, after changes have been made. IMPORTANT: this option should only be used in development environments.
If you want to enable your guardrails server to receive requests directly from another browser-based UI, you need to enable the CORS configuration. You can do this by setting the following environment variables:
NEMO_GUARDRAILS_SERVER_ENABLE_CORS
:True
orFalse
(defaultFalse
).NEMO_GUARDRAILS_SERVER_ALLOWED_ORIGINS
: The list of allowed origins (default*
). You can separate multiple origins using commas.
The OpenAPI specification for the server is available at http://localhost:8000/redoc
or http://localhost:8000/docs
.
To list the available guardrails configurations for the server, use the /v1/rails/configs
endpoint.
GET /v1/rails/configs
Sample response:
[
{"id":"abc"},
{"id":"xyz"},
...
]
To get the completion for a chat session, use the /v1/chat/completions
endpoint:
POST /v1/chat/completions
{
"config_id": "benefits_co",
"messages": [{
"role":"user",
"content":"Hello! What can you do for me?"
}]
}
Sample response:
[{
"role": "bot",
"content": "I can help you with your benefits questions. What can I help you with?"
}]
The completion endpoint also supports combining multiple configurations in a single request. To do this, you can use the config_ids
field instead of config_id
:
POST /v1/chat/completions
{
"config_ids": ["config_1", "config_2"],
"messages": [{
"role":"user",
"content":"Hello! What can you do for me?"
}]
}
The configurations will be combined in the order they are specified in the config_ids
list. If there are any conflicts between the configurations, the last configuration in the list will take precedence. The rails will be combined in the order they are specified in the config_ids
list. The model type and engine across the configurations must be the same.
The Guardrails Server has basic support for storing the conversation threads. This is useful when you can only send the latest user message(s) for a conversation rather than the entire history (e.g., from a third-party integration hook).
To use server-side threads, you have to register a datastore. To do this, you must create a config.py
file in the root of the configurations folder (i.e., the folder containing all the guardrails configurations the server must load). Inside config.py
use the register_datastore
function to register the datastore you want to use.
Out-of-the-box, NeMo Guardrails has support for MemoryStore
(useful for quick testing) and RedisStore
. If you want to use a different backend, you can implement the DataStore
interface and register a different instance in config.py
.
NOTE: to use
RedisStore
you must installaioredis >= 2.0.1
.
Next, when making a call to the /v1/chat/completions
endpoint, you must also include a thread_id
field:
POST /v1/chat/completions
{
"config_id": "config_1",
"thread_id": "1234567890123456",
"messages": [{
"role":"user",
"content":"Hello! What can you do for me?"
}]
}
NOTE: for security reasons, the
thread_id
must have a minimum length of 16 characters.
As an example, check out this configuration.
Currently, threads are not supported when streaming mode is used (will be added in a future release).
Threads are stored indefinitely; there is no cleanup mechanism.
You can use the Chat UI to test a guardrails configuration quickly.
IMPORTANT: You should only use the Chat UI for internal testing. For a production deployment of the NeMo Guardrails server, the Chat UI should be disabled using the --disable-chat-ui
flag.
The Actions Server enables you to run the actions invoked from the guardrails more securely (see Security Guidelines for more details). The action server should be deployed in a separate environment.
Note: Even though highly recommended for production deployments, using an actions server is optional and configured per guardrails configuration. If no actions server is specified in a guardrails configuration, the actions will run in the same process as the guardrails server. To launch the server:
> nemoguardrails actions-server [--port PORT]
On startup, the actions server will automatically register all predefined actions and all actions in the current folder (including sub-folders).
The OpenAPI specification for the actions server is available at http://localhost:8001/redoc
or http://localhost:8001/docs
.
To list the available actions for the server, use the /v1/actions/list
endpoint.
GET /v1/actions/list
Sample response:
["apify","bing_search","google_search","google_serper","openweather_query","searx_search","serp_api_query","wikipedia_query","wolframalpha_query","zapier_nla_query"]
To execute an action with a set of parameters, use the /v1/actions/run
endpoint:
POST /v1/actions/run
{
"action_name": "wolfram_alpha_request",
"action_parameters": {
"query": "What is the largest prime factor for 1024?"
}
}
Sample response:
{
"status": "success",
"result": "2"
}