askbase

Question answering for local knowledge bases with exact source citations.

Setup

uv tool install askbase

Set these environment variables before indexing or asking questions:

• ASKBASE_MODEL
• ASKBASE_MODEL_API_KEY
• ASKBASE_EMBEDDING_MODEL
• ASKBASE_EMBEDDING_MODEL_API_KEY
• ASKBASE_EMBEDDING_BATCH_SIZE

Usage

Build a local SQLite index for a directory:

askbase index -d /path/to/docs

This writes .askbase/askbase.sqlite inside the target directory.

Ask a question against that index:

askbase ask -d /path/to/docs "What does the source say?"

Main Files

• askbase/cli.py: command-line entry point.
• askbase/index.py: indexes source files into SQLite.
• askbase/extract.py: extracts text from Markdown, text, and PDF files.
• askbase/chunk.py: creates line-preserving chunks.
• askbase/db.py: stores documents, chunks, FTS rows, and embeddings.
• askbase/search.py: combines BM25 and embedding retrieval.
• askbase/answer.py: builds evidence prompts and validates citations.