Get started with smolbren: index and search your vault

smolbren is a single binary with no runtime dependencies beyond its own index files. Once it’s installed you register a vault, run one command to build the index, and immediately have BM25 full-text search and Cypher graph queries over your notes.

All smolbren output is single-line JSON written to stdout. Pipe to jq for human-readable formatting: smolbren search "rust async" | jq.

Install

Install the pre-built binary with Homebrew. You do not need Rust or a compiler.

brew install junaidrahim/tap/smolbren

Confirm the binary is available:

smolbren --version

Tell smolbren where your Markdown files live by registering the directory as a named vault. The --default flag makes it the vault used by all subsequent commands. If this is the first vault you register it becomes the default automatically.

smolbren vault add personal ~/path/to/vault --default

You’ll get a JSON confirmation:

{"name":"personal","path":"/home/you/path/to/vault","default":true}

List all registered vaults at any time:

smolbren vault list

Build the index

Index your vault. The first run scans every .md file; subsequent runs are incremental — smolbren compares modification times, file sizes, and content hashes to skip unchanged files.

smolbren index

smolbren prints an IndexStats object when it finishes:

{"scanned":9,"unchanged":0,"added":9,"updated":0,"removed":0,"edges":15,"unresolved_edges":3,"duration_ms":42}

Field	Description
`scanned`	Total `.md` files found in the vault
`unchanged`	Files skipped because mtime/size and content hash matched
`added`	New notes inserted into the index
`updated`	Existing notes whose content changed
`removed`	Notes deleted from disk and removed from the index
`edges`	Total resolved edges in the graph after indexing
`unresolved_edges`	Edges whose wikilink target couldn’t be found
`duration_ms`	Wall-clock time for the full index run

To rebuild the index from scratch (e.g. after bulk renames):

smolbren index --full

Search and query

Full-text search with BM25 — results are ranked by relevance score:

smolbren search "context engineering"

[{"id":"blogs/context-engineering","path":"blogs/context-engineering.md","type":"blog","title":"Context engineering","score":0.87}]

Narrow results to a specific note type with --type:

smolbren search "context engineering" --type blog --limit 5

Graph queries with Cypher — traverse typed relationships between notes:

smolbren query "MATCH (n:blog) RETURN n.title LIMIT 5"

{"columns":["n.title"],"rows":[{"n.title":"Context engineering"},{"n.title":"Context development lifecycle"},{"n.title":"Context platform engineering"}]}

Follow edges between node types:

smolbren query "MATCH (b:blog)-[:mentions]->(n:Note) RETURN b.id, n.id"

Fetch outgoing and incoming links for a specific note:

smolbren links blogs/context-engineering --type mentions
smolbren backlinks projects/prism

Inspect the discovered ontology — all node types and edge types with counts:

smolbren types   # [{"type":"blog","count":3}, {"type":"project","count":2}, ...]
smolbren edges   # [{"edge_type":"mentions","count":6}, ...]

Get Started

Core Concepts

Guides

Configuration

Get started with smolbren: index and search your vault

Next steps

Installation

CLI Reference

​Next steps

Installation

CLI Reference

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