Server Configuration

TIP

We manage the following parameters for you in Typesense Cloud. So this section only applies if you're self-hosting Typesense.

Using Command Line Arguments

Command line arguments can be passed to the server as --parameter=value.

Parameter	Required	Description
--config	false	Path to the configuration file. If you use this argument, you can define all of the other command line arguments in a configuration file. See the "Configuring Typesense" section for more details.
--api-key	true	A bootstrap admin API key that allows all operations. Be sure to create additional keys with specific ACLs using the key management API. NOTE: Don't expose this admin API key to your browser JS client: use the key management API to create search-only or scoped API keys.
--data-dir	true	Path to the directory where data will be stored on disk.
--api-address	false	Address to which Typesense API service binds. Default: 0.0.0.0
--api-port	false	Port on which Typesense API service listens. Default: 8108
--peering-address	false	Internal IP address to which Typesense peering service binds. If this parameter is not specified, Typesense will attempt to use the first available internal IP.
--peering-port	false	Port on which Typesense peering service listens. Default: 8107
--peering-subnet	false	Internal subnet that Typesense should use for peering, e.g. 192.160.1.0/24.
--nodes	false	Path to file containing comma separated string of all nodes in the cluster.
--log-dir	false	By default, Typesense logs to stdout and stderr. To enable logging to a file, provide a path to a logging directory.
--ssl-certificate	false	Path to the SSL certificate file. You must also define ssl-certificate-key to enable HTTPS.
--ssl-certificate-key	false	Path to the SSL certificate key file. You must also define ssl-certificate to enable HTTPS.
--ssl-refresh-interval-seconds	false	Frequency of automatic reloading of SSL certs from disk. Default: 8 * 60 * 60.
--enable-cors	false	Allow JavaScript client to access Typesense directly from the browser.
--cors-domains	false	Comma separated list of domains which are allowed for CORS. E.g. https://example.com,https://example2.com (no trailing slashes!)
--thread-pool-size	false	Number of threads used for handling concurrent requests. Default: NUM_CORES * 8.
--num-collections-parallel-load	false	Number of collections that are loaded in parallel during start up. Default: NUM_CORES * 4.
--num-documents-parallel-load	false	Number of documents per collection that are indexed in parallel during start up. Default: 1000.
--disk-used-max-percentage	false	Reject writes when used disk space exceeds this percentage. Default: 100 (never reject).
--memory-used-max-percentage	false	Reject writes when used memory usage exceeds this percentage. Default: 100 (never reject).
--healthy-read-lag	false	Reads are rejected if the updates lag behind this threshold. Default: 1000.
--healthy-write-lag	false	Writes are rejected if the updates lag behind this threshold. Default: 500.
--snapshot-interval-seconds	false	Frequency of replication log snapshots. Default: 3600 follower recovery. NOTE: Frequent snapshotting helps in faster recovery from a cold start. However, if this value is too low for a large dataset, repeated snapshotting can actually slow down follower recovery.
--log-slow-requests-time-ms	false	Requests that take over this amount of time (in milliseconds) are logged. Default: -1 which disables slow request logging. You can also dynamically enable slow requests logging via the /config API.
--skip-writes	false	Starts Typesense in a mode that does not read writes from the Raft log. This is useful when the server has crashed due to some recent bad writes that you want to skip over temporarily.

Using a Configuration File

As an alternative to command line arguments, you can also configure Typesense server through a configuration file or via environment variables.

Command line arguments are given the highest priority, while environment variables are given the least priority.

Our Linux DEB/RPM packages install the configuration file at /etc/typesense/typesense-server.ini.

The configuration file uses a simple INI format:

Using Environment Variables

If you wish to use environment variables, you can do that too. The environment variables map to the command line arguments documented above: just use CAPS and underscores instead of hyphens, and prefix the variable names with TYPESENSE_.

For example, use TYPESENSE_DATA_DIR for the --data-dir argument.