Configuration

Environment variables, cache tuning, authentication, and database options.

All configuration lives in .env. Defaults work out of the box for local single-user development.

Providers

# Embedding: ollama (local, free) or google (higher quality)
EMBEDDING_PROVIDER=ollama

# LLM: ollama (local, free) | anthropic | openai
LLM_PROVIDER=ollama

# API keys — only needed if using cloud providers
GOOGLE_API_KEY=
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=
OPENAI_API_KEY=

When to use Google embeddings: If retrieval quality matters more than privacy or offline support, text-embedding-004 produces better vectors than nomic-embed-text. Set EMBEDDING_PROVIDER=google and provide GOOGLE_API_KEY.

Database

# SQLite (default for local dev — zero setup)
DATABASE_URL=sqlite+aiosqlite:///./data/orion.db

# PostgreSQL (used in Docker, required for multi-user)
DATABASE_URL=postgresql+asyncpg://orion:password@localhost:5432/orion

Both engines work transparently. SQLite is selected automatically when no DATABASE_URL is set. PostgreSQL is required for concurrent multi-agent access and the Docker deployment.

Authentication

# Bypass auth entirely for local single-user dev
ORION_AUTH_DISABLED=true

# Or require a bearer token
ORION_LOCAL_TOKEN=your-secret-token

When auth is enabled, Orion uses session tokens (7-day expiry, SHA-256 hashed). Four roles:

Role	Planets	Write	Admin	Use case
owner	All	✓	✓	Galaxy creator
admin	All	✓	✓	Team leads
member	Assigned	✓	✗	Contributors
viewer	Assigned	✗	✗	Read-only access

Cache TTLs

Each cognitive region has a tuned Redis cache duration. These aren't arbitrary — they reflect how quickly each type of knowledge changes:

Region	TTL	Rationale
strategic	7 days	Quarterly goals don't shift daily
creative	72 hours	Ideas need time to marinate
procedural	24 hours	Procedures are relatively stable
analytical	8 hours	Decisions evolve within a workday
critical	8 hours	Error patterns are moderately stable
contextual	4 hours	Project context shifts within a session
empathetic	1 hour	Relational dynamics are fluid

Confidence decay

Knowledge that isn't accessed loses confidence during the weekly audit:

Age without access	Decay
30 days	−5%
90 days	−15%

Calibration counteracts decay: records marked as "used" in brain.calibrate get +0.02 per session. Actively useful knowledge maintains high confidence; stale knowledge gradually fades from search results.