diff --git a/app/Dockerfile b/app/Dockerfile
index 4d4ccb9..1c4a434 100644
--- a/app/Dockerfile
+++ b/app/Dockerfile
@@ -33,6 +33,9 @@ COPY requirements.txt /app/
 # Install Python dependencies
 RUN pip install --no-cache-dir -r requirements.txt
 
+# Set the environment variable for the sentence transformers model
+ENV SENTENCE_TRANSFORMERS_HOME="/app/sentence-transformers"
+
 # Preload the sentence transformer model to cache
 RUN python -c "from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer; SentenceTransformer('all-MiniLM-L6-v2')"