I Built a Local RAG Assistant with Ollama, ChromaDB and LangChain. Here's What I Learned

Short summary

An intern built a fully local RAG assistant using Ollama, ChromaDB, LangChain, and Llama 3 to help technicians query 2,111 pages of technical PDFs without sending sensitive data to cloud providers. The system runs via Docker Compose with four services. Key insight: the LLM reads retrieved context fresh at each query—no fine-tuning needed.

• •Fully local RAG pipeline with Ollama + ChromaDB + LangChain + Llama 3
• •Privacy constraint: no data leaves local infrastructure
• •Ingested 2,111 pages into 9,669 chunks; Docker Compose deployment

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