This page is for devops engineers deploying IMP on their own infrastructure. It describes every service in the stack, how they communicate, and why the two-database requirement exists.
Service topology
Services
Frontend
- Image:
ghcr.io/qventu/exulu-frontend:latest
- Port:
3000
- Role: The Next.js web application. Served directly to end-user browsers. Calls the backend over the network; the backend URL is passed via
NEXT_BACKEND at container startup.
Backend
- Port:
9001 (HTTP API), 4000 (LiteLLM proxy — see below)
- Role: The core application server. Handles all API requests from the frontend, manages agents, knowledge, users, budgets, and jobs. There is no published Docker image — the backend is always built locally from the
@exulu/backend npm package (public registry, no token required; see Requirements).
LiteLLM proxy
- Port:
4000
- Role: An OpenAI-compatible proxy that the backend and workers use to reach LLM providers (Anthropic, Google Vertex AI, OpenAI, and others). The proxy is spawned by the backend process when
EXULU_USE_LITELLM=true; you do not run it as a separate service. Port 4000 is published so that worker containers can reach the proxy directly.
- Config: Path set by
LITELLM_CONFIG_PATH (defaults to ./config.litellm.yaml in the example repo).
- Master key: Set via
LITELLM_MASTER_KEY. The backend and workers authenticate against the proxy with this key.
Worker
- Port:
9002
- Role: Processes background jobs (knowledge ingestion, embeddings, evals, routines). Connects to the LiteLLM proxy in client mode — it does not spawn its own proxy. Workers need 8 GB of Node.js heap (
NODE_OPTIONS='--max-old-space-size=8192') because knowledge processing tasks can hold large document representations in memory.
Postgres + pgvector
- Image:
pgvector/pgvector:pg17
- Port:
5432
- Role: Primary application database. Stores agents, users, sessions, knowledge items, chunks, and vector embeddings. The
pgvector extension is required; plain Postgres without it will not work.
LiteLLM Postgres database
- Role: A separate Postgres database used exclusively by the LiteLLM proxy for user/key management, budget tracking, and spend logging.
- Connection string:
LITELLM_DATABASE_URL
LITELLM_DATABASE_URL must point to a different database than the IMP application database. If both env vars point to the same database, the LiteLLM proxy will run prisma db push against it on startup and may drop tables that belong to the IMP schema. The backend detects this condition at startup, prints a loud warning banner to the log, skips LiteLLM database setup, and continues booting — LiteLLM-dependent features (model routing, budget tracking, spend logging) will then fail at runtime. This misconfiguration is not fatal at boot; operators must check startup logs for the warning banner.
Redis
- Image:
redis:7
- Port:
6379
- Role: Job queue backing for BullMQ. Required when running workers. Not required for backend-only deployments without background processing.
S3-compatible storage
- Role: File storage for uploads (chat attachments, session files, knowledge sources). The bucket must exist before the application starts — IMP does not create it.
- Example image (local):
quay.io/minio/minio:RELEASE.2025-04-22T22-12-26Z
- Config prefix:
COMPANION_S3_*
Whisper GPU server (optional)
- Port:
9876
- Role: Transcription backend. Runs WhisperX on a GPU and exposes an HTTP endpoint the backend can call for audio/video transcription. Only required if you use the meeting transcription feature. Start it with
npx @exulu/backend exulu-start-whisper.
Network topology in production
Production deployments use Dokploy and connect services via an external Docker network named dokploy-network. The docker-compose.backend.yml and docker-compose.worker.yml files in the example repo reference this network. In a non-Dokploy setup, replace dokploy-network with a network shared across your compose stacks.
The services compose file (docker-compose.services.yml) uses exulu-network as a bridge network — suitable for local development or when all services run in a single compose project. 
