compliance-scanner-agent/docs/features/help-chat.md

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.