metamind-vault-rag

A retrieval engine for a directory of markdown. It watches files, indexes them incrementally, and answers hybrid search queries over them.

Vectors live in sqlite-vec, keywords in SQLite FTS5, and the two are fused with reciprocal rank fusion. Embeddings run in-process through fastembed's ONNX models, so there is no server to stand up and no API key to hold. An optional cross-encoder rescore tier is available through the rerank extra.

Install

uv tool install metamind-vault-rag

Entry points

Command	Purpose
metamind-vault-rag-watcher	Watch a directory and index changes
metamind-vault-rag-indexer	One-shot full reindex
metamind-vault-rag-http	Loopback HTTP search API
metamind-vault-rag-server	stdio MCP server
metamind-vault-rag-doctor	Environment and index diagnostics

Configuration

Variable	Meaning
VAULT_PATH	Directory to index
VAULT_COLLECTION	Collection name, which scopes the index files
VAULT_HTTP_PORT	Port for the loopback search API
VAULT_STATE_DIR	Where indexes, caches and logs are written. Defaults to ~/.vault-rag

Indexes are written to the state directory, named after the collection, and are never placed inside the corpus. Two clients pointed at different collections, or different state directories, coexist on one machine without either knowing about the other.

Consumers

Installed by any client that wants retrieval without running a service. The engine holds no opinion about who is asking: it names no client in its output, its environment variables are all VAULT_-prefixed, and it writes nothing outside the state directory.

Development

uv run --extra dev pytest

A client can be pointed at a working copy instead of a release with uv tool install --from /path/to/this/repo metamind-vault-rag.

Licence

MIT