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Illinois Chat is now a self-hostable monorepo

Illinois Chat's frontend, backend, and crawler now live together in a single repository — Center-for-AI-Innovation/Illinois-Chat — and the entire platform can be started with one command.

What changed

  • One repository. The previously separate uiuc-chat-frontend, ai-ta-backend, and crawlee repositories were merged (via git subtree, with full history preserved) into apps/frontend, apps/backend, and apps/crawlee. See Monorepo Migration for the details.
  • One-command self-hosting. bash infra/scripts/start-all.sh brings up the frontend, backend, ingest worker, Crawlee, Postgres, Redis, RabbitMQ, MinIO, Qdrant, and Keycloak, then initializes the database and vector collection. See the Self-Hosting guide.
  • Infrastructure as code. Compose files, database migrations, and Keycloak realms all live under infra/.
  • RabbitMQ ingest queue. The document-ingest pipeline now runs on RabbitMQ with a dedicated worker process.
  • Keycloak authentication. A ready-to-use realm ships with the stack, replacing hosted auth for self-hosted deployments.
  • No OpenAI dependency for self-hosting. Embeddings default to Qwen3-Embedding-8B behind any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and chat can run on Ollama/vLLM or free NCSA-hosted models.
  • Apache 2.0. The platform is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

Getting started

git clone https://github.com/Center-for-AI-Innovation/Illinois-Chat.git
cd Illinois-Chat
bash infra/scripts/start-all.sh

Then open http://localhost:3000. Full instructions are in the Self-Hosting guide.