Recommended approach for extending Dockerfile with additional extras?

[pablomdc]

I'm using Cognee in a Docker environment and need to add support for AWS and LangSmith integrations. I've extended the official Dockerfile by adding --extra aws --extra langsmith to both uv sync commands

https://github.com/topoteretes/cognee/blob/main/Dockerfile

Is this the recommended approach for extending the Dockerfile with additional extras, or should extras be configured differently for containerized deployments?

Any guidance would be appreciated!

[dkxmercury]

Your approach is right in principle, and yes, both uv sync lines need to match.

There's no build arg for extras in the Dockerfile (ARG DEBUG is the only one), so editing those two lines is the mechanism. Keeping them in sync matters for a non-obvious reason: the first sync runs with --no-install-project purely so the dependency layer caches well, and the second one installs the project on top. If the two extra lists drift, the second sync reconciles the venv against its own (smaller) list and removes what the first one installed, so you'd get a confusing partial result rather than an error.

Two things worth flagging on the specifics though.

There is no langsmith extra. In pyproject.toml, langsmith ships inside the langchain extra:

langchain = [
    "langsmith>=0.2.3,<1.0.0",
    "langchain_text_splitters>=0.3.2,<1.0.0",
    "langchain-core>=1.2.5"
]

uv doesn't quietly ignore an undefined extra, it hard fails. uv sync --extra langsmith exits 2 with:

error: Extra `langsmith` is not defined in the project's `optional-dependencies` table

So that build should already be erroring out unless something upstream is swallowing it, worth a look at your build logs. aws on the other hand is a real extra (s3fs[boto3]==2025.3.2), so what you want is:

--extra aws --extra langchain

--frozen stays fine, you don't need to re-lock. This trips people up, so to save you the experiment: uv.lock already resolves every extra ahead of time. The cognee entry in the lock lists them under [package.optional-dependencies]:

aws = [
    { name = "s3fs", extra = ["boto3"] },
]
langchain = [
    { name = "langchain-core" },
    { name = "langchain-text-splitters" },
    { name = "langsmith" },
]

so --frozen just selects those already-locked packages. Adding extras to the sync commands never invalidates the lockfile, only editing pyproject.toml would.

One caveat if what you're actually after is LangSmith tracing rather than just the langchain_text_splitters import: installing the extra gets you the package, but cognee doesn't currently wire LangSmith up as a monitoring backend. In cognee/modules/observability/get_observe.py, only Observer.NONE returns a real (no-op) decorator, and everything else falls through to raise UnsupportedObserverError(observer_str). The unit test asserts exactly this, and names it directly: "Unsupported observer (e.g. LLMLITE, LANGSMITH) raises UnsupportedObserverError". So setting monitoring_tool to langsmith will raise at runtime regardless of what's installed. If you want tracing out of a container today, the tracing extra (OpenTelemetry) is the path that's actually implemented, get_observe wraps spans through get_tracer() when it's enabled.

If you only need the langchain packages importable, though, --extra aws --extra langchain on both lines is all there is to it.