Get started with the Chroma integration

⭐ Community Toolkit

Package availability

The Chroma hosting and .NET client integrations are present in the Community Toolkit source, but their packages are not currently published on nuget.org. This documentation describes the APIs verified in that source. Standard NuGet installation cannot be used until packages are published; use an upstream source build if you need to evaluate the integrations before then.

Chroma stores embeddings and documents for similarity search. The Aspire Community Toolkit provides a hosting integration for a Chroma server and a .NET client integration for its v2 API.

Why use Chroma with Aspire

• Declare a Chroma container in the AppHost and pass its allocated endpoint to consuming apps.
• Persist collections with a named volume or a host-directory bind mount.
• Wait for the server’s heartbeat before starting dependent apps.
• Register a singleton .NET client with heartbeat health checks and client-side OpenTelemetry traces and metrics.

How the pieces fit together

The 📦 CommunityToolkit.Aspire.Hosting.Chroma package runs chromadb/chroma in a container. A resource reference supplies a connection string and the server’s host, port, and URI to the consuming app.

The 📦 CommunityToolkit.Aspire.Chroma package registers ChromaDB.Client.ChromaClient from ChromaDotNet.Client in a .NET app. Other languages can use the injected URI with their own client or HTTP requests.

flowchart LR
    AppHost[AppHost hosting integration] --> Chroma[Chroma container]
    AppHost -->|Connection information| App[Consuming app]
    App -->|HTTP v2 API| Chroma

Note

The hosting resource models the server, not individual collections. Create collections and insert embeddings through a consuming app. The client uses default_tenant and default_database unless configured otherwise.

Prerequisites

• Complete the Aspire prerequisites.
• Start a supported container runtime for the Chroma server.
• Create an AppHost and a consuming app. For the .NET examples, add an ASP.NET Core project named Api to the AppHost’s project references.

Set up the integration

1. Install the hosting package in the AppHost and add a resource named chroma. Reference it from the consuming app, and configure the app to wait for Chroma. See Chroma hosting integration for runnable AppHost examples and persistence options.

2. Install the client package in a consuming .NET app and register AddChromaClient("chroma"). The connection name must match the resource name. See Connect with the Chroma integration for registration, keyed clients, and examples in other languages.

3. Run the solution with aspire run. Inspect the Chroma resource’s state and console logs in the dashboard, then call the consuming app.

See also

• Chroma documentation
• Chroma hosting integration
• Connect with the Chroma integration