---
title: "ChromaEmbeddingRetriever"
id: chromaembeddingretriever
slug: "/chromaembeddingretriever"
description: "This is an embedding Retriever compatible with the Chroma Document Store."
---

# ChromaEmbeddingRetriever

This is an embedding Retriever compatible with the Chroma Document Store.

<div className="key-value-table">

|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| **Most common position in a pipeline** | 1. After a Text Embedder and before a [`PromptBuilder`](../builders/promptbuilder.mdx)   in a RAG pipeline  2. The last component in the semantic search pipeline  3. After a Text Embedder and before an [`ExtractiveReader`](../readers/extractivereader.mdx)   in an extractive QA pipeline |
| **Mandatory init variables**           | `document_store`: An instance of a [ChromaDocumentStore](../../document-stores/chromadocumentstore.mdx)                                                                                                                                                                                         |
| **Mandatory run variables**            | `query_embedding`: A list of floats                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         |
| **Output variables**                   | `documents`: A list of documents                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            |
| **API reference**                      | [Chroma](/reference/integrations-chroma)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           |
| **GitHub link**                        | https://github.com/deepset-ai/haystack-core-integrations/tree/main/integrations/chroma                                                                                                                                                                                    |
| **Package name** | `chroma-haystack` |

</div>

## Overview

The `ChromaEmbeddingRetriever` is an embedding-based Retriever compatible with the `ChromaDocumentStore`. It compares the query and document embeddings and fetches the documents most relevant to the query from the `ChromaDocumentStore` based on the outcome.

The query needs to be embedded before being passed to this component. For example, you could use a text [embedder](../embedders.mdx) component.

In addition to the `query_embedding`, the `ChromaEmbeddingRetriever` accepts other optional parameters, including `top_k` (the maximum number of documents to retrieve) and `filters` to narrow down the search space.

### Usage

#### On its own

This Retriever needs the `ChromaDocumentStore` and indexed documents to run.

```python
from haystack_integrations.document_stores.chroma import ChromaDocumentStore
from haystack_integrations.components.retrievers.chroma import ChromaEmbeddingRetriever

document_store = ChromaDocumentStore()

retriever = ChromaEmbeddingRetriever(document_store=document_store)

# example run query
retriever.run(query_embedding=[0.1] * 384)
```

#### In a pipeline

Here is how you could use the `ChromaEmbeddingRetriever` in a pipeline. In this example, you would create two pipelines: an indexing one and a querying one.

In the indexing pipeline, the documents are passed to the Document Embedder and then written into the document Store.

Then, in the querying pipeline, we use a text embedder to get the vector representation of the input query that will be then passed to the  `ChromaEmbeddingRetriever` to get the results.

```python
import os
from pathlib import Path

from haystack import Pipeline
from haystack.dataclasses import Document
from haystack.components.writers import DocumentWriter

# Note: the following requires a "pip install sentence-transformers"
from haystack.components.embedders import (
    SentenceTransformersDocumentEmbedder,
    SentenceTransformersTextEmbedder,
)

from haystack_integrations.document_stores.chroma import ChromaDocumentStore
from haystack_integrations.components.retrievers.chroma import ChromaEmbeddingRetriever
from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer

# Chroma is used in-memory so we use the same instances in the two pipelines below
document_store = ChromaDocumentStore()

documents = [
    Document(content="This contains variable declarations", meta={"title": "one"}),
    Document(
        content="This contains another sort of variable declarations",
        meta={"title": "two"},
    ),
    Document(
        content="This has nothing to do with variable declarations",
        meta={"title": "three"},
    ),
    Document(content="A random doc", meta={"title": "four"}),
]

indexing = Pipeline()
indexing.add_component("embedder", SentenceTransformersDocumentEmbedder())
indexing.add_component("writer", DocumentWriter(document_store))
indexing.connect("embedder.documents", "writer.documents")
indexing.run({"embedder": {"documents": documents}})

querying = Pipeline()
querying.add_component("query_embedder", SentenceTransformersTextEmbedder())
querying.add_component("retriever", ChromaEmbeddingRetriever(document_store))
querying.connect("query_embedder.embedding", "retriever.query_embedding")
results = querying.run({"query_embedder": {"text": "Variable declarations"}})

for d in results["retriever"]["documents"]:
    print(d.meta, d.score)
```

## Additional References

🧑‍🍳 Cookbook: [Use Chroma for RAG and Indexing](https://haystack.deepset.ai/cookbook/chroma-indexing-and-rag-examples)
