haiku.rag/docs/configuration.md

Configuration

Configuration is done through the use of environment variables.

!!! note If you create a db with certain settings and later change them, haiku.rag will detect incompatibilities (for example, if you change embedding provider) and will exit. You can rebuild the database to apply the new settings, see Rebuild Database.

File Monitoring

Set directories to monitor for automatic indexing:

# Monitor single directory
MONITOR_DIRECTORIES="/path/to/documents"

# Monitor multiple directories
MONITOR_DIRECTORIES="/path/to/documents,/another_path/to/documents"

Embedding Providers

If you use Ollama, you can use any pulled model that supports embeddings.

Ollama (Default)

EMBEDDINGS_PROVIDER="ollama"
EMBEDDINGS_MODEL="mxbai-embed-large"
EMBEDDINGS_VECTOR_DIM=1024

VoyageAI

If you want to use VoyageAI embeddings you will need to install haiku.rag with the VoyageAI extras,

uv pip install haiku.rag[voyageai]

EMBEDDINGS_PROVIDER="voyageai"
EMBEDDINGS_MODEL="voyage-3.5"
EMBEDDINGS_VECTOR_DIM=1024
VOYAGE_API_KEY="your-api-key"

OpenAI

If you want to use OpenAI embeddings you will need to install haiku.rag with the VoyageAI extras,

uv pip install haiku.rag[openai]

and set environment variables.

EMBEDDINGS_PROVIDER="openai"
EMBEDDINGS_MODEL="text-embedding-3-small"  # or text-embedding-3-large
EMBEDDINGS_VECTOR_DIM=1536
OPENAI_API_KEY="your-api-key"

Question Answering Providers

Configure which LLM provider to use for question answering.

Ollama (Default)

QA_PROVIDER="ollama"
QA_MODEL="qwen3"
OLLAMA_BASE_URL="http://localhost:11434"

OpenAI

For OpenAI QA, you need to install haiku.rag with OpenAI extras:

uv pip install haiku.rag[openai]

Then configure:

QA_PROVIDER="openai"
QA_MODEL="gpt-4o-mini"  # or gpt-4, gpt-3.5-turbo, etc.
OPENAI_API_KEY="your-api-key"

Anthropic

For Anthropic QA, you need to install haiku.rag with Anthropic extras:

uv pip install haiku.rag[anthropic]

Then configure:

QA_PROVIDER="anthropic"
QA_MODEL="claude-3-5-haiku-20241022"  # or claude-3-5-sonnet-20241022, etc.
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="your-api-key"

Reranking

Reranking is enabled by default and improves search quality by re-ordering the initial search results using specialized models. When enabled, the system retrieves more candidates (3x the requested limit) and then reranks them to return the most relevant results.

If you use the default reranked (running locally), it can slow down searching significantly. To disable reranking for faster searches:

RERANK=false

MixedBread AI (Default)

RERANK_PROVIDER="mxbai"
RERANK_MODEL="mixedbread-ai/mxbai-rerank-base-v2"

Cohere

For Cohere reranking, install with Cohere extras:

uv pip install haiku.rag[cohere]

Then configure:

RERANK_PROVIDER="cohere"
RERANK_MODEL="rerank-v3.5"
COHERE_API_KEY="your-api-key"

Other Settings

Database and Storage

# Default data directory (where SQLite database is stored)
DEFAULT_DATA_DIR="/path/to/data"

Document Processing

# Chunk size for document processing
CHUNK_SIZE=256