Self-Hosting with ZeroDB Local

Self-Hosting with ZeroDB Local

ZeroDB Local runs entirely on your machine. SQLite for storage, FAISS for vector search, inline embeddings — no API key or cloud connection needed.

pip install zerodb-local

Quick Start

from zerodb_local import ZeroDBLocal

## Create a local database
db = ZeroDBLocal("./my-data")

## Store documents (embeddings generated locally)
db.add_texts([
    "ZeroDB is a persistent knowledge layer",
    "Vector search finds similar documents",
    "Agents need memory to be useful",
])

## Search by meaning
results = db.search("database for AI agents", k=3)
for r in results:
    print(f"Score: {r['score']:.3f} — {r['text']}")

Run as a Server

zerodb serve --port 8080 --data ./my-data

This starts a local HTTP server with the same API as the cloud version. Useful for development and testing.

Architecture

Component	Technology	Role
Storage	SQLite	Document and metadata storage
Vector index	FAISS	Approximate nearest neighbor search
Embeddings	Sentence Transformers (inline)	No external API needed

When to Use Local vs Cloud

Feature	ZeroDB Local	ZeroDB Cloud
No API key needed	Yes	No
Runs offline	Yes	No
Free embeddings	Yes (inline)	Yes (TEI)
Multi-tenant	No	Yes
GraphRAG	No	Yes
MCP server	No	Yes
File storage	No	Yes
PostgreSQL	No	Yes
Best for	Dev, testing, privacy	Production, multi-user

PyPI

• Package: zerodb-local on PyPI
• Version: 0.2.0+
• Python: 3.9+

Next Steps

• ZeroDB Cloud — Full cloud product
• MCP Setup — Agent tool integration