How do you run ChromaDB as a standalone HTTP server and connect to it from multiple clients?

For production or multi-process environments, run ChromaDB as a persistent HTTP server and connect all clients via chromadb.HttpClient(). This removes the single-writer SQLite limitation and allows any number of clients — including different languages — to share the same database.

# --- SERVER SIDE ---
# Install: pip install chromadb
# Start the server from the command line:
# chroma run --path ./chroma_data --port 8000 --host 0.0.0.0

# Or run programmatically (e.g. in tests):
import chromadb
from chromadb.config import Settings

# --- CLIENT SIDE ---
client = chromadb.HttpClient(
    host="localhost",
    port=8000,
)

# Verify server is reachable
client.heartbeat()  # raises ConnectionError if server is down

# Usage is identical to PersistentClient
collection = client.get_or_create_collection(
    "shared_docs",
    metadata={"hnsw:space": "cosine"},
)
collection.add(
    documents=["Shared document from client 1"],
    ids=["s1"],
)
results = collection.query(query_texts=["shared content"], n_results=1)
print(results["documents"])

# With authentication (chromadb server configured with auth)
client_auth = chromadb.HttpClient(
    host="my-server.example.com",
    port=443,
    ssl=True,
    headers={"Authorization": "Bearer my-token"},
)

# docker-compose.yml — containerised ChromaDB server
# version: "3.9"
# services:
#   chromadb:
#     image: chromadb/chroma:latest
#     ports:
#       - "8000:8000"
#     volumes:
#       - chroma_data:/chroma/chroma
#     environment:
#       - IS_PERSISTENT=TRUE
#       - ANONYMIZED_TELEMETRY=FALSE
# volumes:
#   chroma_data: