Configuration

SRAKE follows the XDG Base Directory Specification.

Directory structure

Directory	Default Path	Purpose
Config	`~/.config/srake/`	Configuration file
Data	`~/.local/share/srake/`	Database and models
Cache	`~/.cache/srake/`	Downloads, search index
State	`~/.local/state/srake/`	Resume checkpoints

~/.config/srake/
  config.yaml

~/.local/share/srake/
  srake.db
  models/

~/.cache/srake/
  downloads/
  index/
  embeddings/

~/.local/state/srake/
  resume/

Environment variables

Path overrides:

Variable	Default	Description
`SRAKE_DB_PATH`	`~/.local/share/srake/srake.db`	Database path
`SRAKE_INDEX_PATH`	adjacent to database	Search index path
`SRAKE_MODELS_PATH`	`~/.local/share/srake/models`	Models directory
`SRAKE_EMBEDDINGS_PATH`	adjacent to database	Embeddings directory
`SRAKE_CONFIG`	`~/.config/srake/config.yaml`	Config file path

XDG fallbacks (used when SRAKE-specific vars are not set):

Variable	Default
`XDG_CONFIG_HOME`	`~/.config`
`XDG_DATA_HOME`	`~/.local/share`
`XDG_CACHE_HOME`	`~/.cache`
`XDG_STATE_HOME`	`~/.local/state`

Search and output:

Variable	Description
`SRAKE_MODEL_VARIANT`	Embedding model variant: full, quantized, fp16
`SRAKE_SEARCH_BACKEND`	Search backend: tiered, bleve, sqlite
`NO_COLOR`	Disable colored output

Precedence (highest to lowest):

Command-line flags
Environment variables
Config file
Built-in defaults

Config file

Location: ~/.config/srake/config.yaml

data_directory: ~/.local/share/srake

database:
  path: ~/.local/share/srake/srake.db
  cache_size: 10000        # KB
  mmap_size: 268435456     # bytes (256MB)
  journal_mode: WAL

search:
  enabled: true
  backend: tiered          # tiered, bleve, or sqlite
  index_path: ~/.cache/srake/index/srake.bleve
  default_limit: 100
  batch_size: 1000

vectors:
  enabled: true
  similarity_metric: cosine
  use_quantized: true
  dimensions: 768

embeddings:
  enabled: true
  models_directory: ~/.local/share/srake/models
  default_model: Xenova/SapBERT-from-PubMedBERT-fulltext
  default_variant: quantized
  batch_size: 32
  num_threads: 4
  max_text_length: 512
  cache_embeddings: true
  combine_fields:
    - organism
    - library_strategy
    - title
    - abstract

Examples

# Use fast storage for the database
SRAKE_DB_PATH=/mnt/nvme/srake.db srake ingest --auto

# Temporary cache for testing
SRAKE_CACHE_HOME=/tmp/srake srake index --build

# Shared database for multiple users
export SRAKE_DB_PATH=/shared/data/srake.db

CLI Reference