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2.1.3 Frontend: LibreChat

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av edited this page May 23, 2026 · 5 revisions

LibreChat

Handle: librechat
URL: http://localhost:33891

Enhanced ChatGPT Clone: Features OpenAI, Assistants API, Azure, Groq, GPT-4 Vision, Mistral, Bing, Anthropic, OpenRouter, Vertex AI, Gemini, AI model switching, message search, langchain, DALL-E-3, ChatGPT Plugins, OpenAI Functions, Secure Multi-User System, Presets, completely open-source for self-hosting. More features in development.

Starting

# Will start librechat alongside
# the default webui
harbor up librechat

If you want to make LibreChat your default UI, please see the information below:

# Replace the default webui with librechat
# afterwards, you can just run `harbor up`
harbor defaults rm webui
harbor defaults add librechat

# You'll also want to set librechat as a main UI
harbor config set ui.main librechat

# That'll allow you to open the librechat
# directly with
harbor open
harbor qr
harbor tunnel

Integrations

librechat is a full-stack chat UI (with MongoDB, Meilisearch, pgvector, and a RAG API sidecar) that is pre-configured to talk to several local Harbor backends and a wide range of external providers out of the box. No manual endpoint setup is required for the built-in ones.

Pre-configured local backends

The endpoints.custom section in the mounted services/librechat/librechat.yml (merged at startup via the yaml config merger) defines ready-to-use providers:

  • Ollama — points at ${HARBOR_OLLAMA_INTERNAL_URL}/v1/chat/completions; dynamically fetches models when ollama is running alongside.
  • SGLang — points at http://sglang:30000/v1; appears automatically when sglang is started together with librechat.
  • Boost — points at http://boost:8000/v1; appears automatically when boost is started together with librechat.

External providers (key-injected)

The base compose.librechat.yml injects many HARBOR_*_KEY / HARBOR_*_TOKEN environment variables (Anyscale, Groq, Fireworks, Mistral, OpenRouter, Perplexity, Together.ai, Cohere, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, etc.) into the container. These power the corresponding pre-defined endpoints in the config (with fallbacks to user_provided).

RAG and vector store

  • librechat-rag (always started as a dependency) is hardcoded to use ollama for embeddings (EMBEDDINGS_PROVIDER=ollama, OLLAMA_BASE_URL=${HARBOR_OLLAMA_INTERNAL_URL}, model mxbai-embed-large).
  • Embeddings live in the librechat-vector (pgvector) instance.
  • Message/search indexing uses the librechat-search (Meilisearch) instance.
  • All supporting services (librechat-db, librechat-search, librechat-vector, librechat-rag) are brought up via depends_on and wired over the harbor-network.

Reverse proxy / external access

  • With traefik present: compose.x.traefik.librechat.yml adds labels so the UI is reachable at https://librechat.${HARBOR_TRAEFIK_DOMAIN} (websecure entrypoint).

UI replacement

  • LibreChat can replace the default webui entirely (see the "Starting" section for the harbor defaults + harbor config set ui.main librechat flow). After that, harbor open, harbor qr, and harbor tunnel target LibreChat.

Host / volume interactions

  • Persistent user data & chats: ./services/librechat/data (host) ↔ /data/db (inside librechat-db mongo container).
  • Search index: ./services/librechat/meili_data_v1.12 ↔ /meili_data.
  • Vector embeddings (RAG): ./services/librechat/vectordb ↔ /var/lib/postgresql/data.
  • Custom branding / assets: ./services/librechat/images ↔ /app/client/public/images.
  • Config, secrets, and startup script (librechat.yml, .env, override.env, start_librechat.sh) live under ./services/librechat/ on the host and are bind-mounted. The custom entrypoint runs the yaml merger over all *.yml files in /app/configs (arrays such as custom endpoints are concatenated), allowing users to drop extra endpoint definitions without touching the base file.

This wiring means that starting harbor up librechat ollama sglang boost (for example) immediately surfaces all three local providers inside the LibreChat UI with working chat, title generation, and RAG capabilities.

Configuration

LibreChat comes with a lot of features and settings that can be adjusted to your liking. Harbor will keep all the relevant files in the librechat folder of the workspace.

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