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Quick Start

Get up and running with Nancy Brain in under 5 minutes.

Installation

pip install nancy-brain

Create Your First Knowledge Base

1. Initialize a Project

nancy-brain init my-knowledge-base
cd my-knowledge-base

This creates: 

my-knowledge-base/
├── config/
│   ├── repositories.yml    # GitHub repos to index
│   ├── weights.yaml        # Search result weighting
│   └── articles.yml        # PDF articles (optional)
└── knowledge_base/         # Built embeddings will go here

2. Add Some Repositories

Edit config/repositories.yml:

ml_frameworks:
  - name: "scikit-learn"
    url: "https://github.com/scikit-learn/scikit-learn"
    description: "Machine learning library for Python"
    is_notebook: false

  - name: "pytorch"
    url: "https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch" 
    description: "Deep learning framework"
    is_notebook: false

documentation:
  - name: "python-docs"
    url: "https://github.com/python/cpython"
    description: "Python source and documentation"
    is_notebook: false

3. Build the Knowledge Base

nancy-brain build

This will: - Clone the repositories - Extract text from code and documentation - Build AI embeddings for search - Clean up temporary files

4. Search Your Knowledge Base

nancy-brain search "machine learning algorithms"

Expected output: 

1. ml_frameworks/scikit-learn/doc/modules/linear_model.rst (score: 0.89)
   Linear models for regression and classification...

2. ml_frameworks/scikit-learn/sklearn/ensemble/__init__.py (score: 0.82)
   Ensemble methods for classification and regression...

5. Launch Web Interface

nancy-brain ui

Opens at http://localhost:8501 with: - Search interface - Test queries with live results - Repository management - Add/remove repos visually - Build control - Trigger rebuilds with options - System status - Health checks and diagnostics

What's Next?

Common Issues

Build Failed with Git Errors

# Make sure Git is installed and accessible
git --version

# Check repository URLs are accessible
git ls-remote https://github.com/scikit-learn/scikit-learn

No Search Results

# Verify embeddings were built
ls -la knowledge_base/embeddings/

# Check if any documents were indexed
nancy-brain search "test" --limit 10

Permission Errors

# Make sure you have write permissions
chmod -R 755 my-knowledge-base/

Advanced Setup

With PDF Articles

Add research papers to your knowledge base:

# config/articles.yml
research_papers:
  - name: "attention_is_all_you_need"
    url: "https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762.pdf"
    description: "Transformer architecture paper"

Build with articles: 

nancy-brain build --articles-config config/articles.yml

Custom Search Weights

Boost certain file types in search results:

# config/weights.yaml
extensions:
  .md: 1.5      # Boost markdown documentation
  .rst: 1.5     # Boost reStructuredText docs
  .py: 1.0      # Standard weight for Python code
  .txt: 0.8     # Lower weight for plain text

path_includes:
  "README": 2.0     # Boost README files heavily
  "tutorial": 1.5   # Boost tutorial content
  "example": 1.3    # Boost examples

Development Environment

For contributing or advanced usage:

git clone https://github.com/AmberLee2427/nancy-brain.git
cd nancy-brain
pip install -e ".[dev,docs,pdf]"