Configuration

Environment variables

Variable	Default	Purpose
MEMD_DEFAULT_TENANT	default	Fallback tenant for operations without tenant_id.
MEMD_SQLITE_POOL_MAX	16	Max SQLite connections in the pool.
MEMD_DIGEST_SWEEP_INTERVAL_SEC	10	Background digest-sweeper interval; 0 disables.
MEMD_CROSS_ENCODER_DISABLE	unset	When 1, skip ONNX cross-encoder initialization.
ORT_DYLIB_PATH	unset	Override ONNX Runtime shared library location.
MEMD_CONSOLIDATOR	auto	LLM backend for memd consolidate: claude, codex, auto, mock.
MEMD_SHARED_TENANT	unset	Destination tenant for --promote-to-shared consolidations.

Config file

Default location: ~/.config/memd/config.toml. Override with --config <path>.

Full annotated reference:

# memd configuration
#
# Copy to ~/.config/memd/config.toml and customize.

# Directory for tenant data storage.
# Each tenant gets a subdirectory: {data_dir}/{tenant_id}/
# Supports ~ for home directory expansion.
data_dir = "~/.memd/data"

# Logging level: trace, debug, info, warn, error.
log_level = "info"

# Log format: json (recommended for production) or pretty (development).
log_format = "json"

[server]
# Transport for the (deprecated) MCP server. Default: stdio.
transport = "stdio"

# Bind address for HTTP transport (if used).
bind = "127.0.0.1:8787"

# Endpoint path for streamable HTTP transport.
path = "/mcp"

[retrieval]
# Retrieval variant. Use "hybrid" for default; "hybrid-cross-encoder"
# enables the optional ONNX cross-encoder reranker (see Optional rerankers).
search_variant = "hybrid"

Project alias compatibility

Cross-tenant project aliasing is off by default. Enable it only when consolidating mis-routed history; every widened hit produces a warning log. Same-tenant project scoping is the recommended default — keep separate trust domains in separate data directories or under explicit tenant conventions.

Optional reranker assets

The cross-encoder reranker and MemReranker-4B paths have their own cache and runtime configuration. See Optional rerankers.