Chroma's Thin-Client

If you are running Chroma in client-server mode in a Python application, you may not need the full Chroma library. Instead, you can use the lightweight client-only library.

In this case, you can install the chromadb-client package instead of our chromadb package.

The chromadb-client package is a lightweight HTTP client for the server with a minimal dependency footprint.

pip install chromadb-client

# Python
import chromadb
# Example setup of the client to connect to your chroma server
client = chromadb.HttpClient(host='localhost', port=8000)

# Or for async usage:
async def main():
    client = await chromadb.AsyncHttpClient(host='localhost', port=8000)

Note that the chromadb-client package is a subset of the full Chroma library and does not include all the dependencies. If you want to use the full Chroma library, you can install the chromadb package instead.

Most importantly, the thin-client package has no default embedding functions. If you add() documents without embeddings, you must have manually specified an embedding function and install the dependencies for it.