Create Your First Guru

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What is a Guru?

A Guru is an AI-powered Q&A assistant that can answer questions about any topic based on the sources you provide. You can give the below content types to your Guru as a data source:

• 📄 Websites
• 📑 PDF documents
• 🎥 YouTube videos
• 💻 GitHub repositories

After creating a Guru, you can start using it through the Gurubase UI, Website Widget, Slack, Discord, GitHub or API.

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Creating a New Guru

If you’re using Gurubase.io, you can’t create Gurus directly. You need to request a new Guru from the Gurubase team by opening an Guru Creation Request issue. If you want to claim a Guru that already exists, you can open an Guru Claim Request issue.

If you’re using Gurubase Self-hosted, you can create Gurus as follows:

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1. Access the Dashboard

From the dashboard, click the “Create New Guru” button.

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2. Configure Basic Settings

Fill in the following information:

• Guru Name: Choose a descriptive name for your Guru.
• Guru Logo: Upload a logo (PNG or JPEG under 1MB).
• Topics: Add comma-separated topics related to this Guru, e.g., “programming, microservices, containers”. This helps the AI understand the Guru’s expertise and context.
• Codebase Indexing: (Optional) Provide a link to a GitHub repository to index its codebase. The Guru can then use this codebase to generate answers based on it.

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3. Add Knowledge Sources

Your Guru needs sources to learn from. On the “Sources” section, you can add:

1. YouTube Videos: Click “Add YouTube” and paste video URLs on the sidebar opened on the right.
2. Websites: Click “Add Website” and enter webpage URLs. You can use the ‘Crawl Website’ and ‘Import from Sitemap’ tools at the top right of the sidebar to find the URLs of a website.
3. PDF Documents: Click “Upload PDFs” to add documentation files.

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4. Publish Your Guru

Click “Publish Guru” to create your Guru. The system will start indexing your sources and make your Guru available for questions. The processing time depends on the size of the sources.

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Managing Your Guru

Once your Guru is created, you can manage it in several ways.

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Managing Website Sources

1. Click the menu icon (⋮) next to a website source.
2. Select “Edit” to open the URLs management dialog.
3. Here you can:
   • Search through existing URLs.
   • Select and delete specific URLs.
   • See when each URL was last indexed.

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PDF Privacy Settings

For PDF documents, you can control their visibility in the references of the answers:

1. Click the menu icon (⋮) next to a PDF source.
2. Toggle between “Public” and “Private” status.
3. Private PDFs are only accessible to you and your team.

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Reindexing Sources

To update your Guru with the latest content:

1. Click the menu icon (⋮) next to any source.
2. Select “Reindex” to fetch and process the latest content.
3. The system will reindex the source and update the Guru with the latest content.

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Other Management Options

You can also:

• Update basic information like name and topics.
• Monitor source indexing status.
• Delete the Guru if needed.

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Using Your Guru

Once your Guru is ready, you can start using it in 5 ways:

1. Gurubase UI: Navigate to homepage then select your Guru and start asking questions.
2. Website Widget: Embed your Guru on your website.
3. Slack Bot: Add your Guru as a Slack bot.
4. Discord Bot: Add your Guru as a Discord bot.
5. GitHub Bot: Add your Guru as a Github bot.
6. API: Interact and manage your Gurus via API.

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Next Steps