Knowledge Storage

Where agent knowledge is persisted, how to change it, and how to recover a corrupt store

Knowledge persists to an absolute, per-project Chroma store so unrelated projects never share one on-disk database.

Quick Start

1. Use the default location

   Pass sources and let the store persist under the per-project default.

   from praisonaiagents import Agent
   
   agent = Agent(
       name="Research Assistant",
       knowledge=["docs/"]
   )
   
   agent.start("Summarize the docs")

   Data lands at <project>/.praisonai/knowledge/chroma.

2. Choose your own location

   Set vector_store.config.path to store data anywhere you like.

   from praisonaiagents import Agent
   
   agent = Agent(
       name="Research Assistant",
       knowledge={
           "sources": ["docs/"],
           "vector_store": {
               "config": {"path": "/data/my_project/chroma"}
           }
       }
   )
   
   agent.start("Summarize the docs")

Where Is My Data Stored?

Omit path and Knowledge persists to an absolute directory derived from your project root.

The default is absolute and per-project, so two projects — or a test harness that changes directories — never write to the same sqlite file.

How to Change It

Point path at any directory via the Agent config or a standalone Knowledge instance.

from praisonaiagents import Knowledge

kb = Knowledge(config={
    "vector_store": {
        "config": {"path": "/data/shared/chroma"}
    }
})

kb.add("research.pdf")

An explicitly configured path always wins over the default.

What If the Store Is Corrupt?

A corrupt, locked, or version-mismatched Chroma store now raises a RuntimeError instead of crashing the interpreter.

RuntimeError: Chroma persist failed at '<path>' (PanicException: <text>).
Pass a fresh directory via knowledge config vector_store.config.path.

ChromaDB’s rust bindings can raise a PanicException (a BaseException, not Exception) that previously unwound through Agent.start and killed Python — on Windows this showed up as a SIGSEGV or hang (issue #4376). The SDK now catches it and re-raises an actionable Python error, while KeyboardInterrupt still propagates so Ctrl-C keeps working.

Directory indexing behaves the same: a backend panic on one file surfaces as RuntimeError: Knowledge indexing backend crashed on <file> rather than terminating the process.

Recovery: delete the persist directory and re-index, or point path at a fresh directory.

import shutil
from praisonaiagents import Agent

shutil.rmtree(".praisonai/knowledge/chroma", ignore_errors=True)

agent = Agent(name="Research Assistant", knowledge=["docs/"])
agent.start("Re-index and answer")

Configuration Options

Chroma persistence is controlled by a single option under vector_store.config.

Best Practices

Related