Castorini Serve

Castorini Serve

Serve the Castorini stack as cooperating local HTTP services.

Treat Anserini retrieval as the entry point, then add only the downstream services the user actually needs. Prefer gpt-4o as the default OpenAI-backed model for rank_llm, ragnarok, nuggetizer, and umbrela unless the user explicitly asks for a different model.

Default Stack

Use this local port layout unless the user asks for different ports:

• 8081 — Anserini RestServer
• 8082 — rank_llm serve http
• 8083 — ragnarok serve
• 8084 — umbrela serve
• 8085 — nuggetizer serve

Service Selection

• Retrieval only: serve Anserini through io.anserini.api.RestServer.
• Retrieval + rerank: add rank_llm.
• Retrieval + answer generation: use Anserini -> ragnarok, or Anserini -> rank_llm -> ragnarok.
• Retrieval + relevance judgment: use Anserini -> umbrela, or Anserini -> rank_llm -> umbrela.
• Retrieval + nugget creation: use Anserini -> nuggetizer create, or Anserini -> rank_llm -> nuggetizer create.
• Full answer-evaluation flow: keep the original retrieval or rerank payload for nuggetizer create, generate answers with ragnarok, then join the two envelopes for nuggetizer assign.

Reference Files

• references/service-recipes.md — startup commands, port conventions, and per-service defaults
• references/curl-pipelines.md — direct curl, pipe, jq, and full multi-step examples

Gotchas

• rank_llm serves HTTP as rank-llm serve http ..., not plain rank-llm serve ....
• The Anserini fatjar skill documents standalone RestServer on 8080, but the shared Castorini HTTP stack uses 8081 by convention so the other services can stay on 8082 through 8085.
• ragnarok, nuggetizer create, and umbrela can accept raw Anserini search payloads directly because they normalize {query, candidates} inputs.
• ragnarok, nuggetizer create, and umbrela can also accept the castorini.cli.v1 envelope returned by rank_llm, so a raw pipe from rank_llm usually works.
• nuggetizer create must consume the retrieval pool, not ragnarok answer output.
• nuggetizer assign does not consume a bare ragnarok envelope by itself; wrap answer_envelope plus nugget_envelope, or answers_envelope plus nugget_envelope, with jq.
• umbrela judges passage relevance, not answer quality. For answer quality, use the ragnarok plus nuggetizer path instead.

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: castorini
• Source: castorini/castorini-skills
• License: Apache-2.0

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.