Configuration

Environment variables

Variable	Default	Description
LOCALLENS_DATA_DIR	~/.locallens	Directory for Qdrant Edge shard and BM25 index
LOCALLENS_COLLECTION	locallens	Qdrant collection name
LOCALLENS_OLLAMA_URL	http://localhost:11434	Ollama server URL
LOCALLENS_OLLAMA_MODEL	qwen2.5:3b	Ollama model for RAG
LOCALLENS_EMBEDDING_MODEL	all-MiniLM-L6-v2	Sentence-transformers model
QDRANT_SYNC_URL	(unset)	Remote Qdrant server for sync
QDRANT_SYNC_API_KEY	(unset)	API key for remote Qdrant

Example .env file

LOCALLENS_DATA_DIR=~/.locallens
LOCALLENS_OLLAMA_URL=http://localhost:11434
LOCALLENS_OLLAMA_MODEL=qwen2.5:3b
LOCALLENS_EMBEDDING_MODEL=all-MiniLM-L6-v2

Data directory structure

~/.locallens/
├── qdrant_data/          # Qdrant Edge shard files
│   ├── segments/
│   └── ...
└── bm25_index/           # BM25 keyword index

Custom embedding model

You can use any sentence-transformers compatible model:

lens = LocalLens(
    "~/Documents",
    embedding_model="BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5"
)

Or via environment variable:

export LOCALLENS_EMBEDDING_MODEL=BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5

WARNING

Changing the embedding model requires re-indexing all files. Delete the existing shard first:

rm -rf ~/.locallens/qdrant_data
locallens index ~/Documents

Custom Ollama model

Any Ollama model works for RAG:

lens = LocalLens(
    "~/Documents",
    ollama_model="llama3.2:3b"
)

Or via environment variable:

export LOCALLENS_OLLAMA_MODEL=llama3.2:3b
ollama pull llama3.2:3b