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You can build a Graphify knowledge graph without sending a byte to a hosted model. Code is parsed locally with tree-sitter and needs no model at all. For docs, papers and community names, point Graphify at a model running in Ollama on your own machine.

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What you’ll build

  • A code graph built offline.
  • Semantic extraction for docs and community labels on a local model.
  • Settings tuned for a laptop GPU or CPU.

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Setup

Install Ollama from ollama.com, then pull a model. Graphify’s default Ollama model is qwen2.5-coder:7b:
The ollama extra installs the OpenAI-compatible client Graphify uses to talk to Ollama.

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Step 1: Build the code graph offline

--code-only uses only the local parser. On the open-source Graphify-Labs/graphify repository it wrote 19,602 nodes and 44,439 edges in about 26 seconds. For many codebases this is all you need. Stop here if you have no docs to add.

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Step 2: Add docs with a local model

Drop --code-only and choose the Ollama backend:
Graphify sends doc and paper chunks to http://localhost:11434/v1 and uses qwen2.5-coder:7b unless you set OLLAMA_MODEL or pass --model:

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Step 3: Name the communities locally

label reruns clustering and asks the model for a short name for each community, so GRAPH_REPORT.md and the wiki read as “Billing retries” instead of “Community 12”.

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Step 4: Tune for your machine

Local models are slower and have smaller context windows than hosted ones. These settings help:

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Step 5: Point at another machine

If Ollama runs on a different host, such as a GPU box on your network:
OLLAMA_BASE_URL takes priority over OLLAMA_HOST when both are set. For other OpenAI-compatible servers, such as LM Studio or llama.cpp, set OPENAI_BASE_URL and OPENAI_MODEL and use --backend openai.

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When it goes wrong

Requests time out. Raise --api-timeout, lower --max-concurrency to 1, or pick a smaller model. Output is cut off or empty. The chunk didn’t fit the context window. Raise GRAPHIFY_OLLAMA_NUM_CTX or lower --token-budget. Connection refused. Check ollama serve is running and curl http://localhost:11434 answers. Check OLLAMA_BASE_URL isn’t overriding OLLAMA_HOST.

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Production patterns

  • Keep the code graph on git hooks with graphify hook install. It’s code-only, so it never calls the model.
  • Run semantic extraction and label overnight or on a schedule, not on each commit.
  • Review INFERRED edges in GRAPH_REPORT.md. Smaller models infer less reliably than large hosted ones.

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Complete example

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What you built

A knowledge graph of code and docs built entirely on your hardware, tuned for a local model, and kept current by code-only hooks.

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Next steps

Build your first graph

What extract does with code, docs and images.

Self-host a shared MCP

Serve the local graph to your team.

Try it in Graphify

We build and host the graph for you. Start with a 14-day Pro trial, then keep up to 3 repositories on Free. No card required.