Index Settings

The [index] section controls which files are indexed.

Configuration

[index]
include = [
    "**/*.rs",
    "**/*.ts",
    "**/*.tsx",
    "**/*.js",
    "**/*.jsx",
    "**/*.py",
    "**/*.go",
    "**/*.java",
    "**/*.cpp",
    "**/*.cc",
    "**/*.hpp",
    "**/*.md",
]

exclude = [
    "**/node_modules/**",
    "**/target/**",
    "**/dist/**",
    "**/.git/**",
    "**/build/**",
    "**/__pycache__/**",
]

use_gitignore = true

# Multimodal ingest (opt-in). When true, the indexer also walks PDFs,
# extracts their text, and chunks it like a plain-text document.
multimodal = false

# Documents source (opt-in). When true, the indexer also walks HTML files,
# converts them to markdown-ish text, and chunks them by heading structure.
documents = false

Options

Key	Type	Default	Description
`include`	string[]	See above	Glob patterns for files to include
`exclude`	string[]	See above	Additional exclusion patterns (on top of `.gitignore`)
`use_gitignore`	bool	`true`	Whether to respect `.gitignore` files
`multimodal`	bool	`false`	Enable multimodal ingest (PDF text extraction). See below.
`documents`	bool	`false`	Enable the documents source (HTML text extraction). See below.

Notes

Include patterns determine which file extensions are parsed and indexed. Add patterns to index additional file types.
Exclude patterns are applied in addition to .gitignore. Use them to skip generated code, vendor directories, or other non-useful content.
When use_gitignore is true, files matched by .gitignore are automatically excluded even if they match an include pattern.

Multimodal ingest

By default bobbin indexes code, markdown, and beads. Set multimodal = true to also ingest PDFs (runbooks, design docs, specs):

The indexer automatically walks **/*.pdf — you do not need to add it to include. Toggling the flag is the only knob.
Text is extracted with a pure-Rust extractor (no Python, no native toolchain) and chunked like a plain-text document. Chunks are tagged with language = "pdf", so you can filter on them in search.
Image-only or encrypted PDFs may yield little or no text; those files are skipped the same way an empty file is.
Image captioning (vision LLM) is not yet supported and is tracked as a follow-up.

Documents source

Set documents = true to also ingest HTML files (.html, .htm) — exported wikis, generated API docs, saved pages:

The indexer automatically walks **/*.html and **/*.htm — you do not need to add them to include. Toggling the flag is the only knob.
Conversion is a deterministic, dependency-free tag stripper (no model in the loop): <script>/<style>/comments and <head> are dropped, headings become markdown # headings, lists become bullets, <pre> becomes a fenced code block, and entities are decoded. The result runs through the markdown chunker, so headings become section chunks with breadcrumb names.
Chunks are tagged with language = "html", so you can filter on them in search.
Unparseable or text-free HTML degrades to a skipped file (same as an empty file), never a failed index run.
Incremental indexing works as for any other file: unchanged files are skipped by content hash.