[bug] Error when starting Guardrails server – Invalid requirement: 'guardrails-api>="^0.0.0a0"'

[mma666]

Description:
I'm following the Safe and reliable AI via guardrails course on DeepLearning.AI and encountered an issue when trying to start the Guardrails server on Windows 10.

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Environment:

• OS: Windows 10
• Python version: 3.10.16
• Guardrails version: guardrails-ai==0.6.6
• Installed via: pip using a requirements.txt

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Steps to Reproduce:

1. Created a clean virtual environment

2. Installed packages using requirements.txt (successfully):

   bs4  
   guardrails-ai==0.6.6  
   numpy  
   pandas  
   matplotlib  
   openai  
   ipykernel  
   ipywidgets

3. Ran (successfully):

   guardrails configure

4. Installed hub guardrails (successfully), as outlined in the "Instructions to install Guardrails server" section of Lesson 3's notebook in the course:

   guardrails hub install --no-install-local-models hub://guardrails/provenance_llm;
   guardrails hub install hub://guardrails/detect_pii;
   guardrails hub install --no-install-local-models hub://tryolabs/restricttotopic;
   guardrails hub install --no-install-local-models hub://guardrails/competitor_check;

5. Started the server (resulted in an error):

   guardrails start --config config.py

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Observed Error:

Failed to install guardrails-api>="^0.0.0a0"
Exit code: 1
stderr: ERROR: Invalid requirement: 'guardrails-api>="^0.0.0a0"': Expected end or semicolon (after name and no valid version specifier)
    guardrails-api>="^0.0.0a0"
                  ^
stdout:

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Question:

• Is the guardrails-api package supposed to be installed manually?
• It's not mentioned in the documentation or official website. How should I proceed?
• I'd like to follow the official instructions as closely as possible to avoid conflicts. Any advice?

[swucim2]

hi, I met the same issue, can someone please give us suggestion on how to fix it? Thanks!

[bozhlab]

When you run guardrails start, start.py does import guardrails_api.

If it’s missing, it falls back to pip install 'guardrails-api>="^0.0.0a0"' (an invalid spec), so the import still fails.

See the logic here:

guardrails/guardrails/cli/start.py

Line 42 in 62f003b

package_name = 'guardrails-api>="^0.0.0a0"'

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Solution:

• Pre-install the correct package before starting pip install guardrails-api==0.0.5