index

Build or update the search index. Walks repository files, parses them with Tree-sitter (or pulldown-cmark for Markdown), generates embeddings, and stores everything in LanceDB.

Usage

bobbin index [PATH] [OPTIONS]

Examples

bobbin index                           # Full index of current directory
bobbin index --incremental             # Only update changed files
bobbin index --force                   # Force reindex all files
bobbin index --repo myproject          # Tag chunks with a repository name
bobbin index --source /other/repo --repo other  # Index a different directory

Options

To reindex one bead without re-fetching the whole bead corpus, use index-bead.

Maintenance and recovery

Each index run ends with a Lance maintenance sweep (pruning old table versions and compacting fragments). Two properties of that sweep are worth knowing when you run bobbin index on a schedule:

• Maintenance failures fail the command. A sweep that errors makes bobbin index exit non-zero instead of reporting success with a silently skipped compaction. Lock contention is the one non-error outcome: a sweep starved by another process’s lock is reported loudly on stderr (even under --quiet and --json) and labeled skipped_lock_held in --json output.
• FTS compaction panics recover truthfully. Lance’s incremental full-text-index remap can panic while compacting the chunks table. When exactly that failure is detected, bobbin rebuilds the FTS index from scratch — discarding the broken incremental generation — and retries the compaction once. Unrelated compaction errors (I/O, schema, out of memory) are never treated as rebuildable and surface as-is.