It will navigate you to the Create page. Click on Create.
Select a Resource group for your virtual machine
Select a Region where you want to launch the VM(such as East US)
Optionally change the number of cores and amount of memory.
Note: Please select 4vCPU and 16GB RAM or more configuration for your Danswer VM to work as expected.
Select the Authentication type as Password and enter Username as ubuntu and Password of your choice.
Optionally change the OS disk size and its type from the dropdown.
We recommend to use Static IP address for the solution, so that the UI can be accessible from same IP address even after restart. You can configure the Static IP on this Networking page by clicking the Create new option under the Public IP field.
Select the Static IP radio button and Save the changes.
Optionally change the network and subnetwork names. Be sure that whichever network you specify has ports 22 (for ssh), 3389 (for RDP) and 443 (for HTTP) exposed. The VM comes with pre-configured NSG rules.
Optionally go to the Management, Advanced and Tags tabs for any advance settings you want for the VM.
Click on Review + create and then click on Create when you are done.
Virtual Machine will begin deploying.
A summary page displays when the virtual machine is successfully created. Click on Go to resource link to go to the resource page. It will open an overview page of virtual machine.
If you want to update the ubuntu user password then please go to the left navigation pane, select Run command, select RunShellScript and enter following command to change the password of the vm .
sudo echo ubuntu:yourpassword | chpasswd
Now the password for ubuntu user is set, you can connect to the VM’s desktop environment from any local windows machine using RDP protocol or local linux machine using Remmina.
To connect using RDP via Windows Machine, first note the public IP address of the VM from VM details page as highlighted below
Then From you local windows machine, goto “start” menu, in the search box type and select “Remote desktop connection”.
In the “Remote Desktop connection” wizard, copy the public IP address and click connect
This will connect you to the VM’s desktop environment. Provide the username (e.g “ubuntu”) and the password set in the step4 to authenticate. Click OK
Now you are connected to the out of box Danswer VM desktop environment via Windows Machine.
To connect using RDP via Linux machine, first note the external IP of the VM from VM details page,then from your local Linux machine, goto menu, in the search box type and select “Remmina”.
Note: If you don’t have Remmina installed on your Linux machine, firstInstall Remmina as per your linux distribution.
In the “Remmina Remote Desktop Client” wizard, select the RDP option from dropdown and paste the external ip and click enter.
This will connect you to the VM’s desktop environment. Provide “ubuntu” as the userid and the password set in above reset password step to authenticate. Click OK
Now you are connected to out of box Danswer VM desktop environment via Linux machine.
To access the Danswer GUI environment via browser, Copy the Public IP address of the VM from the VM’s details page and enter the address as https://vm_public_ip/ in the browser. Hit enter.
Note: Please use https and not http in the URL when accessing Danswer GUI, e.g. https://35.223.255.180/
While accessing GUI via browser, ssl certification warning will be shown.
On Firefox Browser, Click on Advanced and then select Accept the risk and Continue.
On Chrome Browser, Click on Advanced and select the Proceed to … option.
On Edge Browser , click on Advanced and select the Proceed to … option.
When accessing the UI for the first time , click on the create an account link on the login page, provide your email id and password and hit Sign Up button. This will create the first user with admin role.
Note: You can also limit the new user registration for specific domain. Please follow
How to secure user registration page for more details.
After your first login, it will take you to the connector Page. You can choose any from the available list. Like Files connector here. Have the file uploaded from the selected connector. It will do indexing of the file.
Note: On the initial visit, Danswer will prompt for an OpenAI API key. Without this Danswer will be able to provide search functionalities but not direct Question Answering. You can get it from OpenAI API key .
Once you have created your OpenAI API keys, Go to Danswer GUI, from the admin panel page , click on OpenAI tab in left panel. Add your keys here.
Once indexing of the uploaded file is complete and you have the API Key added, you can use search/chat functionality to query the document. To check the indexing status , go to Existing connector tab from admin menu.
Now you are good to go. Click on search tab to search for anything from the uploaded documents.
Click on Chat tab to start the Chat. You can also ask the follow up questions here.
On Azure Platform, you can also configure DNS for your VM and access the UI using this DNS Name.
To Configure DNS, go to VM’s overview page and click on Configure DNS option.
On this page, provide the DNS name and save the changes.
Go back to VM overview page, it should show you new DNS Name. But if its not showing up then please refresh the page.
