↓ Skip to main content
Chengyu Wang
  1. Blog/

Building a Personal Knowledge Base with MaxKB on My NAS

·1 min
Blog Self-Hosting AI Synology
Author
Chengyu
I’m Chengyu — a final-year Computer Science student at the University of Sydney. I write about the things I build and break, plus hiking, travel, gaming, and gadgets.
Table of Contents

Set up a personal knowledge base today, using the open-source tool MaxKB. To keep it reachable anywhere while still being reasonably secure, I went with a self-hosted deployment on my home NAS rather than a cloud service.

Install steps
#

  1. Open Docker on the Synology NAS and search for the MaxKB project.
  2. Download and configure it. Two things need changing: I set the port to 4444, and created a working directory mapped to /var/lib/postgresql/data.
  3. Once that’s done, it’s reachable at http://<ip>:4444 — default username admin, default password MaxKB@123... Change the password immediately after logging in.
Setting up MaxKB
  1. Create a knowledge base — I made two: one pointed at my blog’s URL, which pulls in and indexes the blog’s content automatically, and one built from local documents.
Blog-backed knowledge base
Local-document knowledge base
  1. Configure the application: pick the knowledge base from the previous step, then set the AI model. I used the OpenAI-compatible Workers AI endpoint from an earlier post, and since most of my documents are in Chinese, I picked Alibaba’s Qwen model specifically. Everything else I left at its default.
  2. And here’s how it looks in actual use:
MaxKB in use

Related