medium severityNeMo Guardrails dialog rails (embeddings_only=True)
Rails.generate() or server returns "I'm sorry, an internal error has occurred." with logs showing embedding model download failures (MaxRetryError, SSLError, Permission denied: '.cache'), no LLM calls, and failure in generate_user_intent during dialog flow processing.
Root cause
When using dialog rails with embeddings_only: True, the system fails to download or access the embedding model (e.g., all-MiniLM-L6-v2 from HuggingFace via fastembed) due to network issues, SSL errors, or permission denied on .cache directory in containerized/deployed environments, causing generate_user_intent action to fail and return generic internal error.
NeMo Guardrailsembeddings_onlyfastembeddialog railsgenerate_user_intentcache permissionSSL error