Embeddings

A lightweight, self-hosted embeddings microservice that mirrors the OpenAI POST /v1/embeddings API — but runs local Hugging Face text embedding models.

Use it as a drop-in embeddings backend for:

• semantic search & nearest-neighbor retrieval
• clustering / grouping
• duplicate detection
• offline indexing pipelines

Scope: text → vector only. No reranking, no training, no “compare” endpoints — just fast, predictable embeddings behind a stable API.

Features

• OpenAI-compatible endpoint: POST /v1/embeddings
• Local inference with Hugging Face models (allowlist via supported_models.txt)
• Input formats: string(s) or token id(s)
• Output formats: float arrays or base64 (encoding_format)
• Optional dimension truncation (dimensions)
• CPU and GPU Docker builds + docker-compose
• Deterministic pooling: mean pooling + L2 normalization

Quickstart

Build:

git clone https://github.com/enot-style/embeddings.git
cd embeddings
docker compose up -d --build

Test:

curl -s http://localhost:11445/v1/embeddings \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model":"jinaai/jina-embeddings-v2-base-en","input":"Hi! This is a test"}'

The first call can take a while because the service needs to download the model from Hugging Face.

OpenAI API compatibility

The API is designed to mirror OpenAI’s embeddings endpoint as closely as possible:

Endpoint

POST /v1/embeddings

API schema

GET /schema.json — OpenAPI schema

OpenAI Embeddings API Reference

Compatibility notes

• token usage is computed using the Hugging Face tokenizer for the chosen model.
• dimensions performs a simple truncation (no re-projection)
• If encoding_format="base64", embeddings are encoded as base64-encoded float32
• Token ID inputs must match the model’s tokenizer vocabulary

Supported models

Embeddings only loads models listed in supported_models.txt.

Add new models by appending their Hugging Face IDs to that file.

Embedding semantics

The service uses a generic mean pooling strategy:

embedding = mean(last_hidden_state * attention_mask)

This produces a single vector per input. Normalization is always enabled.

Requirements & Deployment

Before Publishing

Make sure you have, at minimum:

• an API gateway or reverse proxy with TLS termination
• an external auth/authorization service
• rate limiting and abuse protection
• basic monitoring (logs + metrics + alerts)

Authentication (optional)

Set EMBEDDINGS_API_KEYS to a comma/space-separated list of API keys to require Authorization: Bearer <key> on POST /v1/embeddings. Leave it empty to disable auth.

Hugging Face access token

For public models, HF_TOKEN is optional. For gated/private models, you must set:

export HF_TOKEN=your_token

The token is used only to download model weights.

CPU vs GPU

Embeddings runs on CPU-only systems, but larger models can be slow. For high throughput or large models, GPU is recommended.

Running with Docker

CPU ONLY processing via Docker Compose

Create a .env file with required environment variables (at minimum EMBEDDINGS_PORT if you want to change it):

HF_TOKEN=your_token_if_needed
EMBEDDINGS_PORT=11445

Then run:

git clone https://github.com/enot-style/embeddings.git
cd embeddings
docker compose up -d

GPU processing via Docker Compose

⚠️ Docker GPU passthrough via NVIDIA Container Toolkit is supported only on Linux hosts.

Set PYTORCH_TAG in your .env file to use Dockerfile.gpu. Choose a tag with a CUDA version supported by your NVIDIA driver.

Run the GPU stack with:

docker compose -f docker-compose.yaml -f docker-compose.gpu.yaml up -d --build

Optional quantization (bitsandbytes, any model)

If you want lower VRAM usage, you can enable bitsandbytes quantization for any model:

EMBEDDINGS_BITSANDBYTES=8bit # or 4bit

Notes:

• bitsandbytes only works on CUDA.
• bitsandbytes must be installed (it’s included in requirements.txt).

Jina v3 performance notes (flash-attn)

jinaai/jina-embeddings-v3 can use flash-attn for faster attention on CUDA. If flash-attn is not installed, you may see:

flash_attn is not installed. Using PyTorch native attention implementation.

To enable flash-attn in the GPU image, set this in .env before building:

INSTALL_FLASH_ATTN=1

Rebuild the GPU image after changing it.

Warning

Building flash-attn is time-consuming and highly resource-intensive.

Example requests

Single input

curl -sS http://localhost:11445/v1/embeddings \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2",
    "input": "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
  }'

Batch + base64 encoding

curl -sS http://localhost:11445/v1/embeddings \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2",
    "encoding_format": "base64",
    "input": [
      "First text",
      "Second text"
    ]
  }'

Tests

A few curl-based tests live in tests/. Run them against a running container:

./tests/test_simple.sh
./tests/test_base64.sh
./tests/test_batch.sh