---
id: cohere-compass-sdk
version: "2.16.0"
license: unclear
license_treatment: unclear
maintenance: active
---

# cohere-compass-sdk — Cohere Compass SDK

License: unclear · Maintenance: active · Downloads: 182.5K/mo

## What it is and what it does

The Cohere Compass SDK is a Python client library for interacting with Compass, a document indexing and search system. It provides two main components: a CompassParserClient that sends files to a remote Compass Parser API for parsing (supporting pdf, docx, json, csv and other formats from local, S3, GCS and other file systems), and a CompassClient that manages documents in a Compass index via a RESTful API—allowing you to create, delete, and search indexed documents.

The SDK requires a hosted Compass server to function and uses httpx for HTTP communication, pydantic for data validation, tenacity for retry logic, fsspec for multi-filesystem support, and joblib for batch processing. It supports Python 3.11 and later, with both synchronous and asynchronous client variants available.

Use it for:

- Parse a batch of PDF and DOCX files from S3 and insert them into a Compass index for full-text search
- Build a document ingestion pipeline that reads from local folders, parses multiple file types, and indexes results
- Create a search application that queries indexed documents through the CompassClient API
- Automate document processing workflows that handle different file systems (local, GCS, S3) transparently

## Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts above — verify before relying.

Parse documents via a remote Compass Parser API and manage indexed documents through a Compass API client, supporting multiple file types and file systems.

Yes, if you have a hosted Compass server and need to parse and index documents programmatically. The SDK has low install friction, active maintenance, and no known vulnerabilities. The main blocker is the external dependency on a running Compass server—without it, the SDK cannot function. License status is unclear, so verify licensing terms before production use.

## Install

pip install cohere-compass-sdk
uv add cohere-compass-sdk
poetry add cohere-compass-sdk

## Installing cohere-compass-sdk

Before you install: Low friction installation with five stable runtime dependencies. Package is actively maintained with a recent release.

Quickstart:

pip install cohere-compass-sdk

from cohere_compass_sdk import CompassClient

client = CompassClient(index_url=api_url, bearer_token=bearer_token)
client.create_index(...)

A hosted Compass server must be running and accessible at the provided index_url

Verify before relying:

- Whether a hosted Compass server is required before the SDK can be used in any capacity
- Whether authentication credentials (bearer token) are mandatory or optional for basic operations
- Performance characteristics when parsing large files or batches across different file systems

## Package facts

- License: not declared (unclear)
- Python support: supports_current
- Install friction: low
- Maintenance: active
- Downloads: 182.5K/month (top 15,000 on PyPI)
- Known vulnerabilities: none known

## Tags

document parsing api client, compass index management, multi-format document parsing, s3 gcs local file parsing, document indexing and search, document-parsing, search-indexing, multi-filesystem

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