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mash

Search across your machines

A shared index lets your laptop find chats indexed on your desktop, and vice versa. Each machine keeps its own local history and search service, then publishes to one authenticated Mash server. Machines in the same group can search each other’s published history.

For one machine, skip this setup: local search already works offline.

What you need

Section titled “What you need”
  • Mash installed and initialized on each publishing machine.
  • A local Qdrant instance on each machine.
  • A server running the same Mash release, with Qdrant 1.19+ and persistent storage.
  • An HTTPS endpoint for the Mash API, or a trusted private network.

Configure a new server

Section titled “Configure a new server”

This minimal example uses lexical search so no model download is needed. Save it as server.toml on the API host:

version = 1
listen = "127.0.0.1:8787"
qdrant_url_env = "MASH_QDRANT_URL"
qdrant_grpc_url_env = "MASH_QDRANT_GRPC_URL"


[views.build]
representations = "lexical-only"


[[nodes]]
group_id = "personal"
node_id = "laptop"
token_env = "MASH_LAPTOP_TOKEN"


[[nodes]]
group_id = "personal"
node_id = "desktop"
token_env = "MASH_DESKTOP_TOKEN"

Set the two Qdrant URL variables to the HTTP and gRPC addresses of the same server-side Qdrant instance. Set each node-token variable to a different random secret of at least 32 printable ASCII bytes. Keep tokens out of Git.

Start the API:

Terminal window
mash serve --server-config /absolute/path/to/server.toml

The example listens only on loopback. Put an HTTPS reverse proxy in front of it for other machines to reach it, or change listen to the host’s private-network IP and use that private URL. Keep Qdrant’s own ports private to the API host.

These settings are for a new service. Back up an existing installation before changing it.

Connect each machine

Section titled “Connect each machine”

Edit the node configuration created by mash init. Preserve its providers and local Qdrant settings. Change the existing [index] table and add:

[index]
destination = "both"
since_days = 90


[shared]
group_id = "personal"
node_id = "laptop"
api_url = "https://mash.example.net"
token_env = "MASH_NODE_TOKEN"

Replace the URL with your reachable API endpoint. On the other machine, use node_id = "desktop". Set MASH_NODE_TOKEN to that machine’s matching server token. Make the variable available to the CLI, watcher, and agent’s MCP process.

For the lexical server above, use [views.build] representations = "lexical-only" and [views.query] intent = "exact-mention" on each node. These are the normal model-free init settings. For semantic search, ask the server administrator for matching model settings.

Section titled “Publish and search”

On each machine:

Terminal window
mash index
mash status --shared

For older history, use mash index --all-history. Check each node’s publication and search readiness before expecting its chats to appear elsewhere.

Terminal window
mash search 'authentication'
mash search 'authentication' --shared
mash search 'authentication' --local

The first combines local history and other nodes. The second searches published history only, including this node. The third stays local. Use --node desktop to narrow by publishing identity, not to connect to a host.

Run a watcher on each publishing machine for ongoing updates. If publication fails, local history is retained; inspect the reported shared error and retry indexing once the connection is fixed.

For schema changes, follow upgrades and backups.