Step 1: Create Knowledge Pipeline

Navigate to Knowledge at the top, then click Create > Build a custom knowledge base. There are three ways for you to get started.

Build from Scratch

Click Blank Knowledge Pipeline to build a custom pipeline from scratch. Choose this option when you need custom processing strategies based on specific data source and business requirements.

Templates

Dify offers two types of templates: Built-in Pipeline and Customized. Both template cards display name of knowledge base, description, and tags (including chunk structure).

Built-in Pipeline

Built-in pipelines are official knowledge base templates pre-configured by Dify. These templates are optimized for common document structures and use cases. Simply click Choose to get started.

Types

Name	Chunk Structure	Index Method	Retrieval Setting	Description
General Mode-ECO	General	Economical	Inverted Index	Divide document content into smaller paragraphs, directly used for matching user queries and retrieval.
Parent-child-HQ	Parent-Child	High Quality	Hybrid Search	Adopt advanced chunking strategy, dividing document text into larger parent chunks and smaller child chunks. The parent chunks contain child chunks which ensure both retrieval precision and maintain contextual integrity.
Simple Q&A	Question & Answer	High Quality	Vector Search	Convert tabular data into question-answer format, using question matching to quickly hit corresponding answer information.
LLM Generated Q&A	Question & Answer	High Quality	Vector Search	Generate structured question-answer pairs with large language models based on original text paragraphs. Find relevant answer by using question matching mechanism.
Convert to Markdown	Parent-child	High Quality	Hybrid Search - Weighted Score	Designed for Office native file formats such as DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX, converting them to Markdown format for better information processing. ⚠️ Note: PDF files are not recommended.

To preview the selected built-in pipeline, click Details on any template card. Then, check information in the popup window, including: orchestration structure, pipeline description, and chunk structure. Click Use this Knowledge Pipeline for orchestration.

Customized

Customized templates are user-created and published knowledge pipeline. You can choose a template to start, export the DSL, or view detailed information for any template.

To create a knowledge base from a template, click Choose on the template card. You can also create knowledge base by clicking Use this Knowledge Pipeline when previewing a template. Click More to edit pipeline information, export pipeline, or delete the template.

Import Pipeline

Import a pipeline of a previously exported knowledge pipeline to quickly reuse existing configurations and modify them for different scenarios or requirements. Navigate to the bottom left of the page and click Import from a DSL File. Dify DSL is a YAML-based standard that defines AI application configurations, including model parameters, prompt design, and workflow orchestration. Similar to workflow DSL, knowledge pipeline uses the same YAML format standard to define processing workflows and configurations within a knowledge base.

What’s in a knowledge pipeline DSL:

Name	Description
Data Sources	Local files, websites, online documents, online drive, web crawler
Data Processing	Document extraction, content chunking, cleaning strategies
Knowledge Configuration	Indexing methods, retrieval settings, storage parameters
Node Orchestration	Arrangement and sequence
User Input Form	Custom parameter fields (if configured)