CocoIndex Setting

Certain settings need to be provided for CocoIndex to work, e.g. database connections, app namespace, etc.

Launch CocoIndex

You have two ways to launch CocoIndex:

• Use Cocoindex CLI. It's handy for most routine indexing building and management tasks. It will load settings from environment variables, either already set in your environment, or specified in .env file. See CLI for more details.

• Call CocoIndex functionality from your own Python application or library. It's needed when you want to leverage CocoIndex support for query, or have your custom logic to trigger indexing, etc.

  Python

  You need to explicitly call cocoindex.init() before doing anything with CocoIndex, and settings will be loaded during the call.

  • If it's called without any argument, it will load settings from environment variables. Only existing environment variables already set in your environment will be used. If you want to load environment variables from a specific .env file, consider call load_dotenv() provided by the python-dotenv package.

    from dotenv import load_dotenv
    import cocoindex
    
    load_dotenv()
    cocoindex.init()

  • It takes an optional cocoindex.Settings dataclass object as argument, so you can also construct settings explicitly and pass to it:

    import cocoindex
    
    cocoindex.init(
        cocoindex.Settings(
            database=cocoindex.DatabaseConnectionSpec(
                url="postgres://cocoindex:cocoindex@localhost/cocoindex"
            )
        )
    )

List of Settings

cocoindex.Settings is a dataclass that contains the following fields:

• app_namespace (type: str, required): The namespace of the application.
• database (type: DatabaseConnectionSpec, required): The connection to the Postgres database.

App Namespace

The app_namespace field helps organize flows across different environments (e.g., dev, staging, production), team members, etc. When set, it prefixes flow names with the namespace.

For example, if the namespace is Staging, for a flow with name specified as Flow1 in code, the full name of the flow will be Staging.Flow1. You can also get the current app namespace by calling cocoindex.get_app_namespace() (see Getting App Namespace for more details).

If not set, all flows are in a default unnamed namespace.

Environment variable: COCOINDEX_APP_NAMESPACE

DatabaseConnectionSpec

DatabaseConnectionSpec configures the connection to a database. Only Postgres is supported for now. It has the following fields:

• url (type: str, required): The URL of the Postgres database to use as the internal storage, e.g. postgres://cocoindex:cocoindex@localhost/cocoindex.

  Environment variable for Settings.database.url: COCOINDEX_DATABASE_URL

• user (type: str, optional): The username for the Postgres database. If not provided, username will come from url.

  Environment variable for Settings.database.user: COCOINDEX_DATABASE_USER

• password (type: str, optional): The password for the Postgres database. If not provided, password will come from url.

  Environment variable for Settings.database.password: COCOINDEX_DATABASE_PASSWORD

tip

Please be careful that all values in url needs to be url-encoded if they contain special characters. For this reason, prefer to use the separated user and password fields for username and password.

info

If you use the Postgres database hosted by Supabase, please click Connect on your project dashboard and find the following URL:

• If you're on a IPv6 network, use the URL under Direct connection. You can visit IPv6 test to see if you have IPv6 Internet connection.
• Otherwise, use the URL under Session pooler.

List of Environment Variables

This is the list of environment variables, each of which has a corresponding field in Settings:

environment variable	corresponding field in Settings	required?
COCOINDEX_DATABASE_URL	database.url	Yes
COCOINDEX_DATABASE_USER	database.user	No
COCOINDEX_DATABASE_PASSWORD	database.password	No
COCOINDEX_APP_NAMESPACE	app_namespace	No