---

name: storage-adapters description: "Use ChatterBot SQL, MongoDB, Redis vector, and custom storage adapters, including database_uri, filters, tags, and optional backend troubleshooting." disable-model-invocation: true metadata: disco-role: operating license: BSD 3-Clause

Storage Adapters

Use this sub-skill when a task asks how ChatterBot stores statements, chooses SQL vs MongoDB vs Redis vector storage, configures database_uri, writes or filters statement records, debugs service backends, or implements a custom storage adapter.

Quick route

1. Read references/storage-api.md for storage adapter classes, methods, filter kwargs, and backend-specific configuration.
2. Read references/workflows.md for SQL, MongoDB, Redis vector, tag filtering, custom adapter, and service setup recipes.
3. Read references/troubleshooting.md for SQLite file confusion, MongoDB service timeouts, Redis vector dependencies, missing optional packages, and search mismatch issues.
4. Run scripts/sql_storage_smoke.py for a deterministic SQL storage CRUD/filter smoke test.
5. Run scripts/storage_dependency_check.py before selecting MongoDB or Redis vector storage.

Built-in storage choices

Adapter	Best for	Prerequisites
SQLStorageAdapter	default storage, SQLite, SQLAlchemy-supported databases, exact/indexed text matching	base package; database driver for non-SQLite URIs
MongoDatabaseAdapter	flexible NoSQL statement documents	pymongo, reachable MongoDB service
RedisVectorStorageAdapter	experimental semantic vector search with embeddings	chatterbot[redis], Redis Stack/vector search service, embedding model/provider
DjangoStorageAdapter	Django ORM integration	route to django-integration

Default SQL behavior

from chatterbot import ChatBot

bot = ChatBot(
    "SQL Bot",
    storage_adapter="chatterbot.storage.SQLStorageAdapter",
    database_uri=None,  # in-memory sqlite smoke
)

For a persistent SQLite file:

bot = ChatBot("SQL Bot", database_uri="sqlite:///db.sqlite3")

For non-SQLite databases, pass a SQLAlchemy URI and any supported pool kwargs such as pool_size, max_overflow, pool_timeout, pool_recycle, and pool_pre_ping.

Statement filtering

Storage adapters expose common filter(**kwargs) options such as text, in_response_to, conversation, tags, exclude_text, exclude_text_words, persona_not_startswith, search_text_contains, search_in_response_to_contains, order_by, and page_size. See the API reference before assuming a filter works identically across SQL, MongoDB, and Redis vector storage.

Boundaries

• For ChatBot response lifecycle, route to core-chatbot.
• For training data that creates storage records, route to training.
• For logic/search behavior that consumes storage, route to logic-adapters.
• For Django ORM setup and migrations, route to django-integration.