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Command Line Interface

The haiku-rag CLI provides complete document management functionality.

Note

All commands support:

  • --db - Specify custom database path
  • -h - Show help for specific command

Example: 

haiku-rag list --db /path/to/custom.db
haiku-rag add -h

Document Management

List Documents

haiku-rag list

Add Documents

From text: 

haiku-rag add "Your document content here"

# Attach metadata (repeat --meta for multiple entries)
haiku-rag add "Your document content here" --meta author=alice --meta topic=notes

From file or URL: 

haiku-rag add-src /path/to/document.pdf
haiku-rag add-src https://example.com/article.html

# Optionally set a human‑readable title stored in the DB schema
haiku-rag add-src /mnt/data/doc1.pdf --title "Q3 Financial Report"

# Optionally attach metadata (repeat --meta). Values use JSON parsing if possible:
# numbers, booleans, null, arrays/objects; otherwise kept as strings.
haiku-rag add-src /mnt/data/doc1.pdf --meta source=manual --meta page_count=12 --meta published=true

Note

As you add documents to haiku.rag the database keeps growing. By default, LanceDB supports versioning of your data. Create/update operations are atomic‑feeling: if anything fails during chunking or embedding, the database rolls back to the pre‑operation snapshot using LanceDB table versioning. You can optimize and compact the database by running the vacuum command.

Get Document

haiku-rag get <TAB>
# or
haiku-rag get 3f4a...   # document ID (autocomplete supported)

Delete Document

haiku-rag delete <TAB>
haiku-rag rm <TAB>       # alias

Use this when you want to change things like the embedding model or chunk size for example.

Basic search: 

haiku-rag search "machine learning"

With options: 

haiku-rag search "python programming" --limit 10

Question Answering

Ask questions about your documents: 

haiku-rag ask "Who is the author of haiku.rag?"

Ask questions with citations showing source documents: 

haiku-rag ask "Who is the author of haiku.rag?" --cite

The QA agent will search your documents for relevant information and provide a comprehensive answer. With --cite, responses include citations showing which documents were used. When available, citations use the document title; otherwise they fall back to the URI.

Research

Run the multi-step research graph:

haiku-rag research "How does haiku.rag organize and query documents?" \
  --max-iterations 2 \
  --confidence-threshold 0.8 \
  --max-concurrency 3 \
  --verbose

Flags: - --max-iterations, -n: maximum search/evaluate cycles (default: 3) - --confidence-threshold: stop once evaluation confidence meets/exceeds this (default: 0.8) - --max-concurrency: number of sub-questions searched in parallel each iteration (default: 3) - --verbose: show planning, searching previews, evaluation summary, and stop reason

When --verbose is set the CLI also consumes the internal research stream, printing every log event as agents progress through planning, search, evaluation, and synthesis. If you build your own integration, call stream_research_graph to access the same log, report, and error events and render them however you like while the graph is running.

Server

Start the MCP server: 

# HTTP transport (default)
haiku-rag serve

# stdio transport
haiku-rag serve --stdio

Settings

View current configuration settings: 

haiku-rag settings

Maintenance

Info (Read-only)

Display database metadata without upgrading or modifying it:

haiku-rag info [--db /path/to/your.lancedb]

Shows: - path to the database - stored haiku.rag version (from settings) - embeddings provider/model and vector dimension - number of documents - table versions per table (documents, chunks)

At the end, a separate “Versions” section lists runtime package versions: - haiku.rag - lancedb - docling

Vacuum (Optimize and Cleanup)

Reduce disk usage by optimizing and pruning old table versions across all tables:

haiku-rag vacuum

Rebuild Database

Rebuild the database by deleting all chunks & embeddings and re-indexing all documents. This is useful when want to switch embeddings provider or model:

haiku-rag rebuild

Download Models

Download required runtime models:

haiku-rag download-models

This command: - Downloads Docling OCR/conversion models (no-op if already present). - Pulls Ollama models referenced in your configuration (embeddings, QA, research, rerank).

Migration

Migrate from SQLite to LanceDB

Migrate an existing SQLite database to LanceDB:

haiku-rag migrate /path/to/old_database.sqlite

This will: - Read all documents, chunks, embeddings, and settings from the SQLite database - Create a new LanceDB database with the same data in the same directory - Optimize the new database for best performance

The original SQLite database remains unchanged, so you can safely migrate without risk of data loss.

Shell Autocompletion

Enable shell autocompletion for faster, error‑free usage.

  • Temporary (current shell only): 
    eval "$(haiku-rag --show-completion)"
  • Permanent installation: 
    haiku-rag --install-completion

What’s completed: - get and delete/rm: Document IDs from the selected database (respects --db). - add-src: Local filesystem paths (URLs can still be typed manually).