pack

bobbin pack moves a complete, prebuilt local index between checkouts. A pack includes the LanceDB tables (vectors, FTS, dependency and chunk-edge state), the SQLite metadata/file hashes and temporal coupling graph, and a versioned manifest.

bobbin pack export . --repo my-repo --source ../my-repo -o my-repo.bbpack
bobbin pack verify my-repo.bbpack --path .
bobbin pack import my-repo.bbpack --path . --source ../my-repo

The manifest schema is https://github.com/scbrown/bobbin/index-pack/v1. It binds the payload to the repository name and Git SHA; embedding backend, model ID, model version and dimensions; Bobbin build/version, SQLite version and Lance format version; and a SHA-256 for every payload file. verify refuses checksum, schema, or embedding-identity mismatches.

Import extracts into a staging directory inside .bobbin, verifies before activation, confirms the packed SHA exists and is an ancestor of the checkout’s HEAD, then swaps both stores together. If activation fails, the previous stores are restored. An invalid candidate passed to import is deleted and never activated. Unless --no-reindex is explicitly supplied, import finishes by running Bobbin’s normal hash- and watermark-based incremental index from the packed state to HEAD.

One repository per pack

Build an artifact from a dedicated per-repository Bobbin home. Export refuses a Lance store that contains another repository. This is required because the SQLite temporal-coupling table is not repository-scoped; filtering only the vector rows would make a pack look valid while carrying the wrong coupling graph.

Storage policy

Do not commit large packs into ordinary Git history. Choose transport from the measured compressed artifact size:

Record the measured size for each repository when publishing. A current local Bobbin-only store measured 65,162,206 payload bytes and compressed to 28 MiB, placing it in the Git LFS tier. Quipu, Shantytown and Yupana did not have dedicated local Bobbin indexes at the time this policy was written, so their sizes remain to be measured from actual per-repo packs rather than extrapolated.

Because packs contain source text and metadata, publish them with the same exposure classification as the repository they index.