Morphic.sh or Perplexica: Setup & Test
Is Morphic.sh a good Perplexica alternative? Learn how to set it up in Proxmox with Docker LXC, plus troubleshooting tips and first impressions.
Is morphic.sh an alternative to Perplexica?
While scrolling through news and misc articles I came across morphic.sh and a reference about Perplexity alternative, that had my attention. Having previously written a post on Perplexica as an alternative to Perplexity back in late June of 2024 I wanted to see if this was on par(or maybe better/simpler). Let’s go through the setup.
Setup and install
For this we’ll be setting up an Alpine Docker LXC in Proxmox and go from there. Note that for this we will want to setup a disk size of 5GB and 4GB of RAM for optimal performance.
Run the following command and follow all prompts to set up the Docker LXC Environment.
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bash -c "$(wget -qO - https://github.com/tteck/Proxmox/raw/main/ct/alpine-docker.sh)"
- Fork the following Github repo using the Fork button https://github.com/miurla/morphic.
Run this command to pull down your fork of morphic.
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git clone [email protected]:[YOUR_GITHUB_ACCOUNT]/morphic.git
Now change into that directory.
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cd morphic
Now we’ll make the .env.local file from the example, there are a few things we need to change.
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cp .env.local.example .env.local
Now let’s get in to edit our .env.local file.
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nano .env.local
Now let’s comment out with # the OpenAI and Tavily key lines, they should look like the following.
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############################################### # Required Configuration # These settings are essential for the basic functionality of the system. ############################################### # OpenAI API key retrieved here: https://platform.openai.com/api-keys # OPENAI_API_KEY=[YOUR_OPENAI_API_KEY] # Search Configuration # TAVILY_API_KEY=[YOUR_TAVILY_API_KEY] # Get your # API key at: https://app.tavily.com/home
Then let’s enable Ollama by changing that line to the following.
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# Ollama (Local AI) OLLAMA_BASE_URL=http://[your ollama address here]:11434
Now hit
ctrl+x
and theny
to save those changes.Now we’ll make a small but important change to eliminate some library errors I was getting, run the following to edit that file.
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nano Dockerfile
Make the following change.
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FROM oven/bun:alpine
- Like before hit
ctrl+x
andy
to save our changes.
Let’s get this up and running
Now we can run the docker compose and build with the following command, this will take a few minutes to run.
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docker compose up -d
Now we can go to the ip of our LXC and test it out http://lxc-ip-here:3000
Troubleshooting
If you run into an issue where the morphic page won’t load try the following steps to restart our docker stack.
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docker compose down docker compose up -d
If you get an error bubble on the page itself it should still run. As near as I can tell it’s due to an extension that modifies the page that causes this particular issue.
We’re Done
That’s it, we should now be up and running. There are still a few quirks and I’m early in the testing so there might be a more in depth review in the future.
If you found this post helpful please consider Buying me a coffee. Till next time fair winds and following seas.