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By default, local state lives under: 
<repo>/.semsearch
You can override that with --state-dir.

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Files in .semsearch

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index.db

The local search index. This is a rebuildable cache artifact, not durable user data. It stores immutable snapshots for each provider/model pair. Embedding vectors are kept in dimension-specific vector tables, so a 768-dimension local model and a 1536-dimension OpenRouter model can coexist without replacing each other.

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manifest.json

Tracks local state metadata, schema versioning, and optional remote binding.

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filehashes.db

Stores file-hash state used to skip unchanged files on warm reindex runs.

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file_weights.json

Local path weighting configuration used during ranking.

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yzma/

Local runtime libraries used for embedding inference.

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State-dir vs db-path

The CLI now treats the state directory as the primary unit:
  • --state-dir is the preferred flag
  • --db is a deprecated compatibility alias
That matches the real storage model better, because index.db is only one piece of the full local state.

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Provider and model snapshots

Each provider/model pair has its own active snapshot. Examples:
  • rebuilding llama.cpp/embeddinggemma does not replace llama.cpp/qwen3
  • rebuilding openrouter/openai/text-embedding-3-small does not replace llama.cpp/embeddinggemma
  • switching provider or model requires indexing once with that same provider/model before searching
index.db schema changes may reset old cache data automatically. If local search fails after an upgrade, rebuild with unch index --root ..

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Remote-published state

Remote CI publishes:
  • index.db
  • manifest.json
  • filehashes.db
That allows published state to restore both the active search snapshot and the file-hash cache used by warm reindex scenarios.