Configuration

All configuration is via environment variables. Most are set once in .env and forgotten.

Required

Var	Purpose
BRAVE_API_KEY	Brave Search API key. Get one at api.search.brave.com.
LLM_API_KEY	OpenRouter / OpenAI-compatible provider key. Omit only when LLM_ENDPOINT points to an unauthenticated local server.

LLM judge

Var	Default	Purpose
LLM_JUDGE_ENABLED	false	Master switch. true to enable classification.
LLM_ENDPOINT	http://localhost:1234/v1	Base URL of the chat-completions endpoint.
LLM_MODEL	google/gemma-4-e4b	Model identifier as the provider expects it.
LLM_TIMEOUT_MS	15000	Per-call timeout. Bump to 45000 for OpenRouter with auto-route + concurrency.
LLM_CONCURRENCY	2	Max in-flight LLM requests. 4-8 for hosted, 2 for single-GPU local.
LLM_THINKING	false	Prepend a reasoning preamble and raise token budget. Useful for small local models only.
LLM_PROVIDER_ORDER	(unset)	OpenRouter-specific: comma-separated preferred providers (e.g., groq,cerebras). Auto-route is usually better.

Safety

Var	Purpose
GOOGLE_SAFE_BROWSING_KEY	Google Safe Browsing v4 API key. Omit to disable safety_flag.

Localization defaults

Applied when the tool input doesn’t specify.

Var	Example	Purpose
SIFT_DEFAULT_COUNTRY	JP	ISO-2 uppercase.
SIFT_DEFAULT_SEARCH_LANG	ja	2-3 char lowercase.

Observation logging

Var	Default	Purpose
SIFT_OBSERVATIONS	on	Set to off to disable local JSONL logging entirely.

Optional remote mirror

Var	Default	Purpose
SIFT_OBSERVATION_SYNC_URL	(unset)	Base URL of an HTTP PUT-capable store. Unset = no remote sync.
SIFT_OBSERVATION_SYNC_AUTH	(unset)	Full Authorization header value (e.g., Bearer xxx).
SIFT_OBSERVATION_SYNC_PATH	observations/sift/	Path prefix under the base URL.
SIFT_OBSERVATION_SYNC_INSECURE_TLS	false	true to skip TLS cert verification (needed for Obsidian’s self-signed cert).

See Learning loop for how to use the mirror.