Usage Pattern

Get Started

Build an index from documents:

from llama_index import VectorStoreIndex

index = VectorStoreIndex.from_documents(docs)

Tip

To learn how to load documents, see data connectors

What is happening under the hood?

  1. Documents are chunked up and parsed into Node objects (which are lightweight abstractions over text str that additionally keep track of metadata and relationships).

  2. Additional computation is performed to add Node into index data structure

    Note: the computation is index-specific.

    • For a vector store index, this means calling an embedding model (via API or locally) to compute embedding for the Node objects

    • For a document summary index, this means calling an LLM to generate a summary

Configuring Document Parsing

The most common configuration you might want to change is how to parse document into Node objects.

High-Level API

We can configure our service context to use the desired chunk size and set show_progress to display a progress bar during index construction.

from llama_index import ServiceContext, VectorStoreIndex

service_context = ServiceContext.from_defaults(chunk_size=512)
index = VectorStoreIndex.from_documents(
    docs, service_context=service_context, show_progress=True
)

Note: While the high-level API optimizes for ease-of-use, it does NOT expose full range of configurability.

Low-Level API

You can use the low-level composition API if you need more granular control.

Here we show an example where you want to both modify the text chunk size, disable injecting metadata, and disable creating Node relationships. The steps are:

  1. Configure a node parser

from llama_index.node_parser import SentenceSplitter

parser = SentenceSplitter(
    chunk_size=512,
    include_extra_info=False,
    include_prev_next_rel=False,
)

  1. Parse document into Node objects

nodes = parser.get_nodes_from_documents(documents)

  1. build index from Node objects

index = VectorStoreIndex(nodes)

Handling Document Update

Read more about how to deal with data sources that change over time with Index insertion, deletion, update, and refresh operations.