# Ingesting & Managing Documents

The ingestion of documents can be done in different ways:

* Using the `/ingest` API
* Using the Gradio UI
* Using the Bulk Local Ingestion functionality (check next section)

## Bulk Local Ingestion

When you are running PrivateGPT in a fully local setup, you can ingest a complete folder for convenience (containing
pdf, text files, etc.)
and optionally watch changes on it with the command:

```bash
make ingest /path/to/folder -- --watch
```

To log the processed and failed files to an additional file, use:

```bash
make ingest /path/to/folder -- --watch --log-file /path/to/log/file.log
```

**Note for Windows Users:** Depending on your Windows version and whether you are using PowerShell to execute
PrivateGPT API calls, you may need to include the parameter name before passing the folder path for consumption:

```bash
make ingest arg=/path/to/folder -- --watch --log-file /path/to/log/file.log
```

After ingestion is complete, you should be able to chat with your documents
by navigating to http://localhost:8001 and using the option `Query documents`,
or using the completions / chat API.

## Ingestion troubleshooting

Are you running out of memory when ingesting files?

To do not run out of memory, you should ingest your documents without the LLM loaded in your (video) memory.
To do so, you should change your configuration to set `llm.mode: mock`.

You can also use the existing `PGPT_PROFILES=mock` that will set the following configuration for you:

```yaml
llm:
  mode: mock
embedding:
  mode: local
```

This configuration allows you to use hardware acceleration for creating embeddings while avoiding loading the full LLM into (video) memory.

Once your documents are ingested, you can set the `llm.mode` value back to `local` (or your previous custom value).



## Supported file formats

privateGPT by default supports all the file formats that contains clear text (for example, `.txt` files, `.html`, etc.).
However, these text based file formats as only considered as text files, and are not pre-processed in any other way.

It also supports the following file formats:
* `.hwp`
* `.pdf`
* `.docx`
* `.pptx`
* `.ppt`
* `.pptm`
* `.jpg`
* `.png`
* `.jpeg`
* `.mp3`
* `.mp4`
* `.csv`
* `.epub`
* `.md`
* `.mbox`
* `.ipynb`
* `.json`

**Please note the following nuance**: while `privateGPT` supports these file formats, it **might** require additional
dependencies to be installed in your python's virtual environment.
For example, if you try to ingest `.epub` files, `privateGPT` might fail to do it, and will instead display an
explanatory error asking you to download the necessary dependencies to install this file format.


**Other file formats might work**, but they will be considered as plain text
files (in other words, they will be ingested as `.txt` files).