Notebook Prerequisites

Most of our example notebooks use Astra DB Serverless as the vector database and OpenAI as the LLM.

Create an vector-enabled Astra DB Serverless database at https://astra.datastax.com. For detailed instructions on database creation, see Create a serverless vector database.
Create an OpenAI key at https://platform.openai.com.
Install RAGStack with pip install ragstack-ai.

You’ll need these values for the notebooks:

Prerequisites
Value	Example	Notes
Astra application token	`AstraCS:WSnyFUhRxsrg…`	Must have Database Administrator permissions
Astra API endpoint	https://9d9b9999-999e-9999-9f9a-9b99999dg999-us-east-2.apps.astra.datastax.com\	Endpoint format is https://<ASTRA_DB_ID>-<ASTRA_DB_REGION>.apps.astra.datastax.com
OpenAI key	`sk-xxxx`	Create an OpenAI key at https://platform.openai.com
Astra collection name	`test`	Collections are where your `Documents` are indexed. Automatically created if it doesn’t exist.
GCP service account JSON	`your-project-name-999999-r99b99999999json`	Credentials for GCP usage. See the GCP documentation.
LlamaIndex Cloud API key	`llx-…`	Credentials for LlamaIndex cloud usage.

If a notebook needs additional dependencies, we’ll show you how to install them.

What’s next?

With your prerequisites set up, run the Quickstart!