This is the application package reference. An application package is the deployment unit in Vespa. To deploy an application, create an application package and vespa deploy or use the deploy API. The application package is a directory of files and subdirectories:
Directory/file | Required | Description |
---|---|---|
services.xml | Yes | Describes which services to run where, and their main configuration. |
hosts.xml | No |
Vespa OSS: The mapping from logical nodes to actual hosts. Vespa Cloud: Not used. See node counts in services.xml. |
deployment.xml | Yes, for Vespa Cloud |
Specifies which environments and regions the application is deployed to during automated application deployment, as which application instances. This file also specifies other deployment-related configurations like cloud accounts and private endpoints. The file is required when deploying to the prod environment - it is ignored (with some exceptions) when deploying to dev or perf environments. |
validation-overrides.xml | No | Override, allowing this package to deploy even if it fails validation. |
.vespaignore | No | Contains a list of path patterns that should be excluded from the
application.zip deployed to Vespa. |
models/ | No | Machine-learned models in the application package. Refer to stateless model evaluation, Tensorflow, Onnx, XGBoost, and LightGBM, also see deploying remote models |
schemas/ | No | Contains the *.sd files describing the document types of the application and how they should be queried and processed. |
schemas/[schema]/ | No | Contains *.profile files defining rank profiles. This is an alternative to defining rank profiles inside the schema. |
security/clients.pem | Yes, for Vespa Cloud | PEM encoded X.509 certificates for data plane access. See the security guide for how to generate and use. |
components/ | No | Contains *.jar files containing searcher(s) for the JDisc Container. |
rules/ | No | Contains *.sr files containing rule bases for semantic recognition and translation of the query |
search/query-profiles/ | No | Contains *.xml files containing a named set of search request parameters with values |
constants/ | No | Constant tensors |
tests/ | No | Test files for automated tests |
ext/ | No | Files that are guaranteed to be ignored by Vespa: They are excluded when processing the application package and cannot be referenced from any other element in it. |
Additional files and directories can be placed anywhere in the application package. These will be not be processed explicitly by Vespa when deploying the application package (i.e. they will only be considered if they are referred to from within the application package), but there is no guarantee to how these might be processed in a future release. To extend the application package in a way that is guaranteed to be ignored by Vespa in all future releases, use the ext/ directory.
Command | Description |
---|---|
upload | Uploads an application package to the config server. Normally not used, as prepare includes upload |
prepare |
|
activate |
|
fetch | Use fetch to download the active application package |
An application package can be zipped for deployment:
$ zip -r ../app.zip .
Use any name for the zip file - then refer to the file instead of the path in deploy commands.
Use preprocess directives to:
Below, ${container.port} is replaced by 4099. The contents of content.xml is placed at the include point. This is applied recursively, one can use preprocess directives in included files, as long as namespaces are defined in the top level file:
<services version="1.0" xmlns:preprocess="properties"> <preprocess:properties> <container.port>4099</container.port> </preprocess:properties> <container version="1.0"> <http> <server id="container" port="${container.port}" /> </http> <search /> </container> <preprocess:include file="content.xml" /> </services>
Sample content.xml:
<content version="1.0" > <redundancy>1</redundancy> <documents> <document type="music.sd" mode="index" /> </documents> <nodes> <node hostalias="node0"/> <node hostalias="node1"/> <node hostalias="node2"/> </nodes> </content>
An application can be given a user-defined version, available at /ApplicationStatus. Configure the version in services.xml (at top level):
<services> <config name="container.handler.observability.application-userdata"> <version>42</version> </config> ... </services>