Quickstart

Get up and running with GraphRAG in minutes

GraphRAG can consume significant LLM resources. Start with the tutorial dataset until you understand the system, and experiment with fast/inexpensive models before committing to large indexing jobs.

Get GraphRAG running in 5 steps: install, initialize, configure, index, and query.

Prerequisites

• Python 3.11-3.13
• OpenAI API key or Azure OpenAI credentials

Step 1: Install GraphRAG

1. Create a project directory

   mkdir graphrag_quickstart
   cd graphrag_quickstart
   python -m venv .venv
   
2. Activate your virtual environment

   Unix/MacOS

   source .venv/bin/activate
   

   .venv\Scripts\activate
   

   .venv\Scripts\activate.bat
   
3. Install the package

   pip install graphrag
   

Step 2: Initialize your workspace

Initialize GraphRAG to create the necessary configuration files:

graphrag init

When prompted, specify your preferred models:

• Chat model: gpt-4.1 (default) or gpt-4-turbo
• Embedding model: text-embedding-3-large (default)

This creates:

• settings.yaml - Main configuration file
• .env - Environment variables (API keys)
• input/ - Directory for source documents
• prompts/ - Customizable extraction prompts

Step 3: Configure your API key

OpenAI

Edit .env and add your OpenAI API key:

GRAPHRAG_API_KEY=sk-...

Azure OpenAI

Edit .env and add your Azure OpenAI API key:

GRAPHRAG_API_KEY=your-azure-api-key

Then update settings.yaml with your Azure configuration:

models:
  completions:
    type: chat
    model_provider: azure
    model: gpt-4.1
    deployment_name: your-deployment-name
    api_base: https://your-instance.openai.azure.com
    api_version: 2024-02-15-preview
    
  embeddings:
    type: embedding
    model_provider: azure
    model: text-embedding-3-large
    deployment_name: your-embedding-deployment
    api_base: https://your-instance.openai.azure.com
    api_version: 2024-02-15-preview

Step 4: Add your data

Download the sample dataset (A Christmas Carol):

curl https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/24022/pg24022.txt -o ./input/book.txt

Or add your own documents to the input/ directory. Supported formats:

• .txt files
• .csv files (with text column)
• .json files (with text field)

Step 5: Run the indexing pipeline

Build your knowledge graph index:

graphrag index

This process:

1. Chunks your documents into text units
2. Extracts entities, relationships, and claims
3. Builds a knowledge graph
4. Detects hierarchical communities
5. Generates community summaries
6. Creates vector embeddings

Indexing typically takes 5-15 minutes for the sample dataset with GPT-4. Cost: approximately $0.50-$2.00 depending on the model and dataset size.

The output is saved to output/ as parquet files.

Step 6: Query your knowledge graph

Now you can ask questions about your data using different search methods:

Global search

Best for questions about the entire dataset:

graphrag query "What are the main themes in this story?"

Local search

Best for specific entity-focused questions:

graphrag query "Who is Scrooge and what are his main relationships?" --method local

DRIFT search

Best for questions needing both entity details and community context:

graphrag query "How does Scrooge's character develop throughout the story?" --method drift

Understanding the search methods

Global search

Best for: Holistic dataset understanding

Uses all community summaries in a map-reduce process. Ideal for “what are the main themes” type questions.

Local search

Best for: Entity-specific questions

Retrieves entities and their neighbors. Ideal for “who is X” or “what does Y do” questions.

DRIFT search

Best for: Multi-level reasoning

Combines local entity retrieval with community context. Ideal for complex questions requiring both depth and breadth.

Next steps

Configuration

Customize indexing, chunking, and model settings

Prompt tuning

Generate domain-specific prompts for better extraction

Query engine

Learn about all four search methods in depth

Python API

Use GraphRAG programmatically in your applications

Troubleshooting

Rate limit errors

If you hit rate limits:

1. Reduce parallelization in settings.yaml:

   parallelization:
     concurrent_requests: 5  # Reduce from default 25
   

2. Add delays between requests:

   concurrent_requests: 5
   rate_limit_per_minute: 300
   

High costs

To reduce indexing costs:

1. Use gpt-3.5-turbo for initial testing
2. Enable caching to avoid re-processing:
   cache:
     type: file
   
3. Use the “fast” indexing method:
   graphrag index --method fast
   

Out of memory errors

For large datasets:

1. Increase chunk overlap to reduce total chunks
2. Reduce max_cluster_size in settings
3. Process documents in batches

Poor extraction quality

Improve extraction with prompt tuning:

graphrag prompt-tune

This auto-generates prompts optimized for your domain and data.