System requirements

For a small to medium installation we recommend the following resources.

Hardware

Software

• Docker 24+ and Docker Compose v2 (for the container installation)
• PostgreSQL 15+ with the vector extension, pgvector 0.7+ (0.8+ recommended). 0.7 is a hard floor from this release on, even if you never use 3072-dimensional embeddings: the schema contains two search indexes on the halfvec type, which only exists from 0.7 — both db:migrate and db:schema:load abort on older extensions. Before upgrading an existing installation, check SELECT extversion FROM pg_extension WHERE extname='vector'; and run ALTER EXTENSION vector UPDATE; if needed.
• libvips 8.13+ (8.15+ recommended). Rails calls Vips.block_untrusted at boot, a guard against CVE-2026-66066. Without that method the application does not boot at all — not for migrations either, and not for rails runner. Odd but deliberate: a system with no libvips starts (you merely lose image variants); only an old one aborts. ⚠️ Ubuntu 22.04 ships 8.12.1 and nothing newer, backports included; build libvips from source into /usr/local there, or move to Ubuntu 24.04, which carries 8.15. Check with vips --version, or more precisely from the application: bundle exec ruby -e 'require "vips"; p Vips.respond_to?(:block_untrusted)'.
• A TLS certificate (e.g. via Let's Encrypt) for production

Network

Lalabase needs outbound access to your AI provider (e.g. OpenAI) if you use the AI features. All other services run inside your own infrastructure.