Configuration

Updated May 23, 2026

Dear Diary is configured through environment variables. These may be set directly in the shell, via a .env file in the working directory, or through the MCP client configuration.

Environment variables

Table 1: Configuration environment variables.

Variable Description Required Default
QDRANT_URL URL of the Qdrant server (including port) Yes[^1] —
QDRANT_API_KEY API key for Qdrant authentication No —
COLLECTION_NAME Default collection name (supports interpolation[^2]) No —
QDRANT_LOCAL_PATH Path for local Qdrant storage Yes[^1] —
EMBEDDING_MODEL FastEmbed model identifier No sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2
QDRANT_SEARCH_LIMIT Maximum number of search results No 10
QDRANT_READ_ONLY Disable write operations No false
TOOL_STORE_DESCRIPTION Custom description for store tool No —
TOOL_FIND_DESCRIPTION Custom description for find tool No —

Connection modes

Dear Diary supports two mutually exclusive connection modes:

  1. Remote mode — Connect to a Qdrant server via QDRANT_URL
  2. Local mode — Use local file storage via QDRANT_LOCAL_PATH

Exactly one of these must be configured.

Example configuration

Create a .env file in the project root:

QDRANT_URL=https://abc123.eu-west-1-0.aws.cloud.qdrant.io:6334
QDRANT_API_KEY=your_qdrant_api_key_here
COLLECTION_NAME=my-memories
EMBEDDING_MODEL=sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2
QDRANT_SEARCH_LIMIT=10

Collection name interpolation

The COLLECTION_NAME environment variable supports placeholder interpolation. Placeholders are enclosed in braces and resolved at startup from the current git repository and working directory.

Table 2: Supported placeholders for COLLECTION_NAME.

Placeholder Description Example value
{repo} Repository name from origin remote dear-diary
{owner} Repository owner from origin remote leynos
{cwd} Basename of the current working directory my-project
{branch} Current git branch name main

Repository information is inferred from the origin remote URL. HTTPS, SSH, and SCP-style URLs are all supported. For Source Hut repositories, the tilde prefix is stripped from the owner (e.g. ~sircmpwn becomes sircmpwn).

Example

COLLECTION_NAME={owner}-{repo}-notes

With a remote of [email protected]:leynos/dear-diary.git, this resolves to leynos-dear-diary-notes.

Error behaviour

If a placeholder is used, but the corresponding value cannot be determined, the server fails to start with a descriptive error message. Only placeholders that are present in the value are evaluated, so {cwd} can be used outside a git repository without requiring {repo} or {branch}.

Common failure scenarios:

  • {repo} or {owner} used, but no origin remote is configured
  • {branch} used, but HEAD is detached, or the directory is not a git repository
  • {cwd} used, but the current directory cannot be determined

Qdrant Cloud configuration

When connecting to Qdrant Cloud, use port 6334 for gRPC connections:

QDRANT_URL=https://abc123.eu-west-1-0.aws.cloud.qdrant.io:6334
QDRANT_API_KEY=your_cloud_api_key_from_qdrant_console