# Help Chat Assistant

The Help Chat is a floating assistant available on every page of the dashboard. It answers questions about the Compliance Scanner using the project documentation as its knowledge base.

## How It Works

1. Click the **?** button in the bottom-right corner of any page
2. Type your question and press Enter
3. The assistant responds with answers grounded in the project documentation

The chat supports multi-turn conversations -- you can ask follow-up questions and the assistant will remember the context of your conversation.

## What You Can Ask

- **Getting started**: "How do I add a repository?" / "How do I trigger a scan?"
- **Features**: "What is SBOM?" / "How does the code knowledge graph work?"
- **Configuration**: "How do I set up webhooks?" / "What environment variables are needed?"
- **Scanning**: "What does the scan pipeline do?" / "How does LLM triage work?"
- **DAST & Pentesting**: "How do I run a pentest?" / "What DAST tools are available?"
- **Integrations**: "How do I connect to GitHub?" / "What is MCP?"

## Technical Details

The help chat loads all project documentation (README, guides, feature docs, reference) at startup and caches them in memory. When you ask a question, it sends your message along with the full documentation context to the LLM via LiteLLM, which generates a grounded response.

### API Endpoint

```
POST /api/v1/help/chat
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "message": "How do I add a repository?",
  "history": [
    { "role": "user", "content": "previous question" },
    { "role": "assistant", "content": "previous answer" }
  ]
}
```

### Configuration

The help chat uses the same LiteLLM configuration as other LLM features:

| Environment Variable | Description | Default |
|---------------------|-------------|---------|
| `LITELLM_URL` | LiteLLM API base URL | `http://localhost:4000` |
| `LITELLM_MODEL` | Model for chat responses | `gpt-4o` |
| `LITELLM_API_KEY` | API key (optional) | -- |

### Documentation Sources

The assistant indexes the following documentation at startup:

- `README.md` -- Project overview and quick start
- `docs/guide/` -- Getting started, repositories, findings, SBOM, scanning, issues, webhooks
- `docs/features/` -- AI Chat, DAST, Code Graph, MCP Server, Pentesting, Help Chat
- `docs/reference/` -- Glossary, tools reference

If documentation files are not found at startup (e.g., in a minimal Docker deployment), the assistant falls back to general knowledge about the project.