Environment Variables

There are two environment modes:

• Full Docker / e2e — reads the repository-root .env (created from .env.template). Compose maps values into each container and overrides local service URLs with Docker service names.
• Local development — app processes read their own files: apps/backend/.env, apps/frontend/.env, apps/crawlee/.env. infra/scripts/start-dev.sh creates or appends missing keys without overwriting existing values.

Never commit .env files

Environment files contain secrets. They are gitignored — keep it that way.

Required local secrets

Change all of these before any non-local use:

Variable	Default	Description
POSTGRES_PASSWORD	placeholder	PostgreSQL password.
INGEST_REDIS_PASSWORD	placeholder	Redis password for the ingest queue.
QDRANT_API_KEY	placeholder	Qdrant API key — must match qdrant_config.yaml.
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID / AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY	minioadmin	MinIO (S3) credentials.
KEYCLOAK_ADMIN_PASSWORD	admin	Keycloak admin password.

Resource names

Variable	Default	Description
POSTGRES_USER / POSTGRES_DATABASE	postgres	Database user and name.
S3_BUCKET_NAME	uiuc-chat	Object-storage bucket for uploaded files.
QDRANT_COLLECTION_NAME	illinois-chat-qwen	Vector collection (4096-dim cosine vectors).
AWS_REGION	us-east-1	Region passed to the S3 client.

Host ports

Variable	Default
FRONTEND_PORT	3000
CRAWLEE_PORT	3345
POSTGRES_PORT	5432
KEYCLOAK_DB_PORT	5433
PUBLIC_MINIO_API_PORT	10000
PUBLIC_MINIO_DASHBOARD_PORT	9001

MinIO endpoints for app processes (always the API port, never the console):

MINIO_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:10000
MINIO_PUBLIC_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:10000
MINIO_URL=http://localhost:10000

Authentication (Keycloak)

Variable	Default	Description
KEYCLOAK_ADMIN_USERNAME	admin	Keycloak admin user.
NEXT_PUBLIC_KEYCLOAK_URL	http://localhost:8080/	Keycloak base URL.
NEXT_PUBLIC_KEYCLOAK_REALM	illinois_chat_realm	Realm (bootstrapped from infra/keycloak/realms/).
NEXT_PUBLIC_KEYCLOAK_CLIENT_ID	illinois_chat	OIDC client ID.
NEXT_PUBLIC_USE_ILLINOIS_CHAT_CONFIG	True	Use the Illinois Chat auth configuration.
NEXT_PUBLIC_SIGNING_KEY	(empty)	JWT signing key for the frontend.

Model endpoints

Model, embedding, and API-key values are intentionally empty in the template so each deployment picks its own providers:

Variable	Default	Description
EMBEDDING_MODEL	Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B	Embedding model (4096-dim vectors expected by the default Qdrant collection).
EMBEDDING_API_BASE	http://host.docker.internal:11434/v1	OpenAI-compatible endpoint serving the embedding model (default points at Ollama on the host).
NCSA_HOSTED_API_KEY	(empty)	Key for NCSA-hosted models.
NCSA_HOSTED_VLM_BASE_URL	(empty)	Base URL for the NCSA-hosted vision model.
OLLAMA_SERVER_URL	(empty)	Ollama server for local LLM serving.

Optional observability & integrations

Variable	Description
POSTHOG_API_KEY, NEXT_PUBLIC_POSTHOG_KEY, NEXT_PUBLIC_POSTHOG_HOST	PostHog product analytics.
NOMIC_API_KEY	Nomic Atlas semantic maps of documents and conversations.
SENTRY_DSN	Sentry error monitoring.

See .env.template at the repository root for the canonical, up-to-date list.