Settings and features

Every setting lives in the dashboard: open it with the gear icon in the sidebar footer. Changes apply immediately; nothing needs a restart unless noted.

Features

Full git history

Free, off by default. Enabled, SourceVault indexes every commit in a repository instead of the latest 500, so history questions ("when did this change, and why?") draw on the complete record. The first index of a large repository takes a while and shows progress in the dashboard; after that, each index run only adds commits that are new since the last one. Turning it off returns to the capped behavior on the next index.

Multi-repo Ask

A licensed feature (Pro and up). Ask one question across every indexed repository at once, with each citation tagged by repo. Locked toggles show a tag; enter your license key in the same section to unlock.

Sentinel

A licensed feature. An enforcement layer between the index and everything that reads it: an access policy over which files AI may read at all, secret redaction on every answer before delivery, and a tamper-evident decision log.

AI-change provenance

A licensed feature. Classifies commits for AI authorship and security relevance and records the result, so "what did the AI change in auth this month?" has a grounded answer.

Audit log

Team and Enterprise installs additionally see the audit log toggle: a hash-chained record of enforcement decisions with a signed monthly head anchor, suitable for compliance reporting.

Appearance and notifications

Desktop notifications

Off by default, and delivered entirely by your browser: a watch flags drift, an index run of a minute or longer finishes or fails, or health turns unhealthy. Nothing routes through a push service, so nothing leaves your machine; notifications fire while the dashboard is open (a tab or the installed app), and the app icon carries a badge counting watches that drifted since you last looked. Enabling the toggle asks the browser for permission; if the browser has notifications blocked for the site, the toggle explains how to re-allow them.

Advanced

History backend

Which store serves git-history search. ChromaDB is the default. Qdrant keeps history queries fast when full-history indexing takes a repository to tens of thousands of commits; in our benchmarks on an 82,000-commit history, filtered queries ran roughly seventy times faster.

Choosing Qdrant verifies the backend before the change is saved: SourceVault downloads a version-pinned, checksum-verified engine (about 30 MB, one time), starts it locally with storage inside the SourceVault state directory, and only then commits the setting. A problem shows up in the settings dialog, not during a later index run. After a switch, each repository rebuilds its history index on its next reindex; search keeps working on the old backend until then.

Installs configured through the CODE_HISTORY_BACKEND environment variable show this control disabled with a note: the environment outranks the dashboard, so a click can never overrule an operator.

Plan limits

Pricing counts sources: a git repository or a local folder each use one slot, and all loose individual files share a single pooled slot. The Sources row shows usage against your plan's cap, and the dashboard asks you to remove a source or upgrade rather than failing silently at the limit.

For operators: environment variables

Server deployments (Docker, systemd) configure by environment. Where an environment variable and a dashboard setting overlap, the environment wins and the dashboard says so.

VariableDefaultPurpose
PORT9000HTTP port for the API and dashboard
DASHBOARD_TOKENauto-provisionedDashboard access token; one is generated at first boot if unset
REPO_ROOT~/.hermes/reposWhere indexed repositories live
OLLAMA_CHAT_MODELqwen3-coder:30bAnswering model; use qwen2.5-coder:14b on machines under 24 GB RAM
CODE_HISTORY_BACKENDunsetForces the history store (chroma or qdrant) and disables the dashboard control
CODE_QDRANT_URLunsetUse an external Qdrant instead of the managed one
CODE_HISTORY_MAX_COMMITS500History depth when full git history is off
CODE_SEARCH_HMAC_SECRETgeneratedSigning secret for the machine API (search, read, history)