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Welcome to smolbren — an ontology-first search CLI for Markdown vaults. It turns your frontmatter into a typed knowledge graph, layers BM25 full-text search on top, and exposes everything through single-line JSON output that agents and scripts can consume directly. No server, no cloud, no configuration sprawl — just your notes and a fast local index.

Introduction

Understand what smolbren does, how its core concepts fit together, and which workflows it’s built for.

Quickstart

Install smolbren, register your vault, build the index, and run your first search in under five minutes.

Ontology

Learn how frontmatter type keys and wikilink-valued fields become graph node labels and typed edges.

CLI Reference

Full reference for every smolbren subcommand, flag, and exit code.

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Get started in three steps

1

Install smolbren

Make sure you have the Rust toolchain and protoc on your PATH, then install from crates.io:
cargo install smolbren
2

Register your vault

Point smolbren at your Markdown directory. The first vault you add automatically becomes the default:
smolbren vault add personal ~/notes --default
3

Index and search

Build the index (incremental by default — only changed files are re-read), then start querying:
smolbren index
smolbren search "context engineering"
smolbren query "MATCH (n:blog) RETURN n.title LIMIT 5"