# How-to manuals and Guides

Explore our concise guides to configure, manage, and query Weaviate.
Whether you’re setting up advanced configurations or handling data operations, our step-by-step instructions and examples are designed to help you quickly master Weaviate.

## How-to manuals

::::card-grid
:::card{title="How-to: Configure Weaviate" href="/guides/how-to-configure-weaviate-index" icon="settings"}
Configure compression, backups, authentication, authorization, data replication and more.
:::

:::card{title="How-to: Manage collections" href="/guides/how-to-manage-collections-index" icon="layers"}
Manage collections (CRUD), configure vectorizers and index parameters, set up multi-tenancy, and perform migrations.
:::

:::card{title="How-to: Manage objects" href="/guides/how-to-manage-objects-index" icon="box"}
Adding new objects, fetching existing ones, modifying them, and removing them from collections.
:::

:::card{title="How-to: Query & search" href="/guides/how-to-query-search-index" icon="search"}
From basic vector and hybrid searches to specialized image queries and performing data aggregations.
:::
::::

## Other guides and tutorials

::::card-grid
:::card{title="Deployment guides" href="/guides/deploy-config-overview" icon="database"}
Learn how to install and configure Weaviate for production.
:::

:::card{title="Tutorials" href="/guides/guides-tutorials-index" icon="presentation"}
Step-by-step guides and practical examples.
:::

:::card{title="Starter guides" href="/guides/starter-guides-index" icon="compass"}
Guides and tips for new users learning how to use Weaviate.
:::

:::card{title="Recipes" href="/guides/recipes-index" icon="scroll"}
Jupyter Notebooks that showcase various use cases and functionalities.
:::
::::

## Related pages

- [Agents](./agents-index.md)
- [AI-assisted Weaviate code generation](./ai-assisted-vibe-coding-index.md)
- [APIs](./apis-index.md)
- [Authorization and authentication](./authorization-and-authentication-index.md)
- [Benchmarks](./benchmarks-index.md)
- [Best practices](./best-practices-index.md)
- [Client libraries](./clients-index.md)
- [Client Libraries / SDKs](./client-libraries-index.md)
- [Cloud](./cloud-index.md)
- [Cloud account management](./cloud-account-management-index.md)

# Agent Instructions

This portal answers questions programmatically. To receive a synthesized,
source-cited answer instead of crawling page by page, append the `?ask=`
query parameter to any page URL on this site:

    /guides/quickstart?ask=how+do+I+authenticate

Optional parameters:

- `&goal=<what-you-are-trying-to-do>` steers the answer toward your
  objective (e.g. `&goal=write+a+python+client`).
- `&version=<label>` scopes the answer to a mounted version when the
  portal publishes more than one.

The response is `text/markdown`: the answer followed by a `# Sources` list
of the portal pages it was grounded in. Status codes are the contract:

- `200` — the answer; `402` — the portal owner’s plan or answer credits are
  exhausted (surface this to your operator; do NOT retry); `429` — you are
  rate-limited; back off for the `Retry-After` seconds; `503` — the answer
  lane is temporarily unavailable; fall back to crawling the `.md` pages.

For the full corpus map read `llms.txt` at the site root; for the tool
surface (search + page fetch as MCP tools) see `/mcp`.