Skip to content
jarvis

jarvis index

Index a repo: detect language, run the language indexer, convert to SQLite, build Zoekt (and optional semantic) indexes, atomically publish.

Usage

Section titled “Usage”
Terminal window
jarvis index <path> [options]

Arguments

Section titled “Arguments”
NameRequiredDescription
pathyesPath to the repo to index

Options

Section titled “Options”
FlagDescription
--slug <name>Override the auto-derived slug
--scheme <name>Xcode scheme to build (Swift repos using xcodebuild with more than one scheme)
--semantic-include <path>Force-include a path prefix the generated-file filter would skip. Repeatable — pass it once per prefix. Persisted and reused by reindex/watch
--language <name>Force the indexer language instead of detecting it from git-tracked files. Choices: java, python, swift, typescript. Persisted and reused by reindex/watch
--search-onlySkip SCIP indexing and publish only Zoekt + semantic search. Persisted and reused by reindex/watch

Behavior

Section titled “Behavior”
  1. Language detection — counts source files by extension across git-tracked files only (a filesystem walk would also count gitignored scratch directories) and picks the winner; one language per repo. Extension families: .ts/.tsx → typescript, .py → python, .java/.kt → java, .swift → swift. Ties break by fixed priority: .ts, .tsx, .py, .java, .kt, .swift. --language overrides detection entirely.
  2. Language indexer — the matching scip-* CLI emits a .scip protobuf file.
  3. scip version gate — jarvis index refuses to run scip expt-convert below scip 0.9.0. This is a settled behavior, not a conservative default: older scip silently writes a schema-valid database with zero chunks and zero mentions, so every navigation query returns empty with no error. Re-run setup.sh to get a compliant scip build.
  4. SCIP → SQLite — scip expt-convert produces index-<sha>.db.
  5. Zoekt — zoekt-git-index builds search shards from git-tracked files.
  6. Optional semantic — if the [semantic] extra is installed: tree-sitter chunk + bge-m3 embed → LanceDB. Non-fatal on failure; never blocks publish.
  7. Search-only publishing — with --search-only (or after an automatic fallback), SCIP indexing is skipped entirely: only Zoekt and semantic search are published. Navigation tools (goToDefinition, findReferences, callHierarchy, typeHierarchy, documentSymbols) don’t work on a search-only repo; searchCode and semanticSearch do.
  8. Persisted options — --search-only, --semantic-include, --scheme, and --language are recorded in the registry and reused automatically by jarvis reindex and jarvis watch; there is no flag to clear them — re-run jarvis index with new values to change them.
  9. Atomic publish — os.replace() pointer swap on the current file; a status/reindex never observes a half-written index.

The fallback ladder

Section titled “The fallback ladder”

When a language indexer produces zero SCIP shards, jarvis auto-falls back to --search-only:

  • scip-java + Android/AGP — AGP replaces source sets; zero shards (scip-java#177)
  • scip-kotlinc version mismatch — compiler-plugin API unstable across versions

Example

Section titled “Example”
Terminal window
jarvis index /path/to/your/repo
jarvis status your-repo
slug: your-repo
path: /path/to/your/repo
language: python
status: indexed
commit: abc1234
last_indexed: 2026-08-22T10:00:00+00:00
semantic: -