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Building Online RAG Pipelines

Companion wiki to the repository and the 51-slide course.

Start here: Quickstart · The Seven Steps · FAQ · Glossary

What this is

A hand-written retrieval-augmented generation pipeline in plain JavaScript. Seven steps, no orchestration framework. It runs end to end after git clone with no API key, no database and no network.

What it is not

A production system you should deploy unread. It ships development defaults so it runs immediately — read Security before deploying anything.

Navigation

Page	For
Quickstart	Getting it running in two minutes
The Seven Steps	The conceptual map
Choosing a Chunk Size	The decision that matters most
Choosing an Embedding Model	Providers, dimensions, cost
Choosing a Vector Store	JSON, pgvector, and the alternatives
Hybrid Retrieval	Why dense search alone is not enough
Evaluation	Measuring instead of guessing
Security	Keys, tenancy, prompt injection
Troubleshooting	Symptom, cause, fix
FAQ	Questions that come up every cohort
Glossary	Terms, defined once
For Instructors	Running this as a course

Licence

MIT, Copyright (c) 2026 Prof. Etemi Joshua Garba. No permission is required to adopt, edit, refactor or teach from these materials.