groundedkit1
Docbound · free and open source

Chat with your documents, in Spring Boot

Docbound is a production-ready RAG starter for Java. Answers stream in, cite the exact passages they came from, and say "not found" instead of guessing. It runs on your machine with Ollama: no API keys, and your documents never leave it.

View on GitHub Quick start
Docbound demo: uploading a handbook, asking a question, opening the cited passage, and an off-topic question answered with 'not found'

What you get

A complete, tested application you can clone, run in minutes, and build your own product on.

Cited, grounded answers

Every claim links to the passage it came from. Questions your documents can't answer get "not found", not a made-up reply.

Runs fully locally

Ollama runs the models on your own machine. No API keys, no per-token bills, and no documents sent to a third party.

Measured retrieval

Structure-aware chunking, tuned with an included evaluation harness: the right passage ranks in the top 5 for all 55 questions in its test set.

A complete app

Spring Boot 4.1 + Spring AI 2.0, a React UI, PostgreSQL + pgvector, tests and CI, all started with one Docker command.

Running in minutes

Works on macOS, Windows and Linux. You need:

  1. Docker: Docker Desktop, or Docker Engine on Linux
  2. Ollama, installed and running
  3. 8 GB RAM and about 5 GB of free disk

Step-by-step instructions for each system are in the README. 

# one-time: download the models (~2.3 GB)
ollama pull llama3.2
ollama pull nomic-embed-text

# get the code and start everything
git clone https://github.com/groundedkit/docbound.git
cd docbound
docker compose up --build

# then open http://localhost:3000

Free and open source

Docbound is the whole app, not a teaser: every feature on this page is in the repository, under the Apache 2.0 license.

Docbound Apache 2.0

Clone it, change it, ship it

  • Upload PDF, Word, Markdown, text and HTML
  • Streaming answers with citations
  • Follow-up questions within a conversation
  • Source panel showing the exact passage
  • "Not found" instead of guessing
  • Retrieval evaluation harness
  • Tests, CI and one-command Docker setup
Get it on GitHub

Help shape it

What should come next is up to the people using it.

  • Found a bug or a wrong answer? Open an issue with the question and document type.
  • Missing something, like another model provider or login? Ask for it in an issue.
  • Find it useful? A star helps other Java developers find it.
Open an issue