[Install issue]: Unable to connect to chromaDB on AWS

[a11yster]

What happened?

I followed you AWS deployment guide on AWS and I deployed it on the CLI using the cloud formation template, but I got this error while creating the embeddings.

[Nest] 57817 - 07/14/2025, 10:55:19 PM ERROR [IngestService] Error upserting demo collection (SDK):
Unable to connect to the chromadb server (status: 500). Please try again later.
[Nest] 57817 - 07/14/2025, 10:55:19 PM ERROR [ExceptionsHandler] Unable to connect to the chromadb server (status: 500). Please try again later.

Versions

"@chroma-core/openai": "^0.1.7",

Relevant log output

[eric-burel]

I experience issues when trying to connect to Chroma using version 3 of chromadb on Ubuntu, while it works fine after an npm install chroma@2 (so 2.4.6), could it be related?

[jairad26]

Hi @a11yster, could you share your server deployment config, as well as the client code to connect?

[eric-burel]

@jairad26 after more investigation on my side this actually happens with bun only, sorry I couldn't test with Node.js earlier (TS support of bun is much much better :)). I thought about this after having a different issue with Node vs Bun.

Example script that leads to this error:

import { ChromaClient } from "chromadb";
import { DefaultEmbeddingFunction } from "@chroma-core/default-embed";
const ef = new DefaultEmbeddingFunction();
const client = new ChromaClient();
const collection = await client.getCollection({
  name: "my_collection2",
  embeddingFunction: ef,
});
const embedding = (
  await ef.generate([
    `
  Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. 
  Sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. 
  Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. 
  Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. 
  Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
`,
  ])
)[0];
const results = await collection.query({
  queryEmbeddings: [embedding],
  nResults: 10,
});
console.log(results)

Result:

bun script.js 
652 |     this.name = name;
653 |   }
654 | };
655 | var ChromaConnectionError = class extends Error {
656 |   constructor(message, cause) {
657 |     super(message);
          ^
ChromaConnectionError: Unable to connect to the chromadb server (status: 405). Please try again later.
      at new ChromaConnectionError (/home/eric-burel/code/chroma-test/node_modules/chromadb/dist/chromadb.mjs:657:5)
      at /home/eric-burel/code/chroma-test/node_modules/chromadb/dist/chromadb.mjs:1705:9

Bun v1.1.8 (Linux x64)

It works fine with Node.js. This may be a separate issue than the original author though as the error code is different (they got a 500, not a 405 which is a method error), but it could be interesting to discover what's wrong with bun.