[Request] Support external database, for self-hosted version

[jasongitmail]

🥰 Feature Description

Using IndexDB browser storage has a couple limitations:

1. User's data could get deleted by clearing the browser's site data.
2. Chat history, agents, settings, etc are not available across devices–e.g. laptop and mobile.

The option to connect a hosted, serverless-compatible database would solve this, e.g.:

• VercelSQL (1 free DB on free plan)
• NeonDB (1 free DB)
• Cloudflare D1 (generous free tier) and Cloudflare Vectorize

VercelSQL (based on NeonDB) & NeonDB (based on Postgres) both support vector embeddings, which would allow for RAG too.

🧐 Proposed Solution

This would require user authentication.

• For a single-user instance, this could be a Personal Access Token, i.e. a random string defined as an environment variable, that LobeChat prompts the user for once, stores locally in browser storage, and sends with requests to the LobeChat instance to store or retrieve chat history. (probably works for 95% of people)
• For a multi-user instance, user accounts would be required. (You could define a list of allowed users as an env var comma-concatenated string or similar to prevent public registrations and limit it to just family/friends, or allow anyone to register if not specified. Each account should provide it's own API keys, so you could keep LobeChat's current API key handling and just ask the user enter their API keys on each device that they use.) Update: I see OpenAI key is prompted for during Vercel deployment, so this might need to be done differently, I haven't looked at the code.

This way if the browser's site data is cleared, no chat history or agents are lost and it can be shared across devices; only the API keys would need to be re-entered.

📝 Additional Information

No response

[lobehubbot]

👀 @jasongitmail

Thank you for raising an issue. We will investigate into the matter and get back to you as soon as possible. Please make sure you have given us as much context as possible.\ 非常感谢您提交 issue。我们会尽快调查此事，并尽快回复您。 请确保您已经提供了尽可能多的背景信息。

[andrewluetgers]

this would be nice

[julianbrennum]

Yes, this would be nice. But I don't think it need to be serverless. MongoDB, Postgres etc would be fine. It would also be nice if the "login" interface was the first thing the user was getting if they are not logged in.

[jasongitmail]

But I don't think it need to be serverless. MongoDB, Postgres etc would be fine.

@julianbrennum The repo suggests Vercel or Docker for hosting currently. While you're correct for those who choose to use Docker for deployment on a regular server, others who use Vercel need a DB that provides an HTTP interface, since serverless hosts can't reliably maintain long-lived connections to a DB. But there are providers of Mongo and Postgres (and others) that meet that requirement (e.g. Neon for Postgres)

[AdamsGH]

Yes, this would be nice. But I don't think it need to be serverless. MongoDB, Postgres etc would be fine. It would also be nice if the "login" interface was the first thing the user was getting if they are not logged in.

Fully agree with you, really miss login button and spent some time to find it

[lobehubbot]

✅ @jasongitmail

This issue is closed, If you have any questions, you can comment and reply.\ 此问题已经关闭。如果您有任何问题，可以留言并回复。

[arvinxx]

Database Server DB Guide：https://lobehub.com/docs/self-hosting/advanced/server-database

[lobehubbot]

Bot detected the issue body's language is not English, translate it automatically. 👯👭🏻🧑‍🤝‍🧑👫🧑🏿‍🤝‍🧑🏻👩🏾‍🤝‍👨🏿👬🏿

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Database Server DB Guide：https://lobehub.com/docs/self-hosting/advanced/server-database

[lobehubbot]

:tada: This issue has been resolved in version 1.0.8 :tada:

The release is available on:

• npm package (@latest dist-tag)
• GitHub release

Your semantic-release bot :package::rocket: