CRTX Documentation

Everything you need to run, use, extend, and embed CRTX — a production-grade Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) platform. Upload your documents, ask questions in natural language, get answers backed by your own content with cited sources, and measure answer quality over time.

New here? Start with Introduction for the mental model, then jump to the Quickstart to get a working instance in ~15 minutes.

#Table of contents

#Get started

Introduction — What CRTX is, the core concepts, and a glossary.
Quickstart — Stand up the backend, worker, and frontend locally.

#Guides — using the product

Ingesting documents — Every supported format and how it is chunked, embedded, and made searchable.
Querying & chat — Streaming answers, sources, sessions, and follow-ups.
Retrieval tuning — Similarity vs. MMR vs. threshold, reranking, Top-K, chunk size, neighbour stitching.
Evaluation & quality — Faithfulness and context-relevance scoring, and the dashboard.
Sharing & collaboration — Share links, member permissions, and shared chats.
Business playbooks — Concrete ways to fold CRTX into support, sales, legal, ops, and internal knowledge.

#API — build on CRTX

Authentication — How the JWT-based auth works today.
API reference — Every endpoint, request/response shape, error, and the SSE streaming contract.
Programmatic access & API keys — Design + roadmap for API keys, SDKs, webhooks, and an embeddable widget.

#Deploy & operate

Configuration — Every environment variable, with defaults.
Self-hosting & deploying in your environment — Docker Compose, single-tenant/VPC, on-prem, bring-your-own-keys, data residency.
Operations & scaling — The worker, observability, indexes, and known scaling limits.

#Reference

Scaling audit — Point-in-time review of the query hot path and table reads.

#How to render these docs as a "docs page"

These files are plain GitHub-Flavored Markdown with a stable folder layout, so you can publish them with essentially any docs toolchain without rewriting content:

Option	Best when	How
GitHub / repo browsing	You want zero setup	Already works — the relative links resolve on GitHub.
In-app `/docs` route	You want docs inside the CRTX frontend	Add an `app/docs/[[...slug]]` route that reads these `.md` files and renders them with a Markdown component. See the note below about Next.js 16.
Nextra / Docusaurus / Mintlify	You want a polished standalone docs site	Point the tool at this `docs/` folder; the tree maps directly to nav sections.

Next.js 16 note: the frontend runs a build of Next.js with breaking changes from older releases. If you add an in-app docs route, read the guides under frontend/node_modules/next/dist/docs/ before writing routing or data- fetching code — training-data conventions may be stale.

#Conventions used in these docs

Base URL refers to your backend origin (e.g. http://localhost:8000 locally, or your Railway URL in production). All API paths are relative to it.
All API examples assume Authorization: Bearer <token> unless stated otherwise.
Placeholders look like <your-project> or {collection_id}.
"Owner" = the user who created a collection. "Member" = a user who joined via a share link. See Sharing & collaboration.