The outcome

Answer from a governed corpus with traceable sources, explicit refresh rules, and tested unanswerable behavior.

Dify is a open-source low-code platform for AI applications, workflows, agents, knowledge, and LLM operations. Building low-code AI workflows, chatflows, agents, RAG applications, model integrations, plugins, and deployable APIs with operational visibility. This guide narrows that broad capability into one repeatable outcome, with checkpoints that keep the source material and your judgment in the loop.

Before you begin

Set the boundary before the tool starts.

Choose one real task, identify who will use the result, and decide what evidence or test will make the result acceptable. Gather only the source material needed for that task. If the work contains confidential, personal, regulated, or client-owned information, confirm that the platform and account are approved before sharing it.

Troiana principle

AI should make the work easier to inspect. If the workflow removes the source, the owner, or the review step, redesign the workflow.

Step by step

A workflow you can repeat.

  1. 01

    Define source owners, readers, permissions, retention, freshness, expected questions, citations, and a benchmark with unanswerable cases.

  2. 02

    Create a dedicated knowledge base, clean and deduplicate documents, remove secrets, and choose parsing and chunking for representative formats.

  3. 03

    Configure embedding, retrieval, top-k, score threshold, reranking, and metadata filters while preserving source and access identifiers.

  4. 04

    Attach retrieval to a test app and inspect retrieved chunks separately from answers for recall, stale data, injection, contradictions, and leakage.

  5. 05

    Require source-backed responses and abstention, restrict app and API access, and test updates, deletions, monitoring, and index rollback.

Working standard

What good use looks like.

  • Isolate corpora by access boundary.
  • Evaluate retrieval separately from answers.
  • Test refresh and deletion propagation.

Dify workflows can connect models, knowledge, code, plugins, webhooks, and external tools that carry different data and execution risks. Isolate workspaces, protect provider and app keys, prefer deterministic nodes for fixed rules, validate every input and output, treat plugins as code, restrict tools and knowledge access, inspect logs and retention, test failure and pause paths, pin self-hosted versions, and keep exports and rollback procedures.

Official references

Check the current product documentation.

Features, plan limits, availability, and data controls change. These official pages are the starting points used for this collection.