plugmem-cli

⚠️ Experimental. plugmem is mostly an AI-built experiment — written with the help of a small local model (Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf) and various Claude models, in roughly equal measure. Expect non-professional design choices, rough edges, broken behavior, or mistakes. Use it at your own risk.

plugmem-cli is the command-line surface over the plugmem temporal-memory engine — a thin shell around plugmem-host that lets you (or an agent's launcher) keep a memory in a single file from a terminal or a shell script. Each one-shot command parses arguments, calls one engine verb, and prints the result (a human report, --json for tooling); the interactive plugmem repl keeps the engine open across commands for host speed. No memory logic lives here.

The installed binary is plugmem-cli.

Install

Prebuilt for Linux, Windows and macOS (x64 & arm64) on every tagged release. Pick one method — you don't need more than one; they install the same plugmem-cli binary.

Homebrew (macOS / Linux)

From the m62624/homebrew-plugmem tap; brew upgrade / brew uninstall then manage it like any formula:

$ brew install m62624/plugmem/plugmem-cli

Installer script (no Rust toolchain)

latest always points at the newest tag on the Releases page:

# Linux / macOS  (POSIX sh)
$ curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/m62624/plugmem/releases/latest/download/plugmem-cli-installer.sh | sh

# Windows (PowerShell) — alternative to the .msi
> powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -c "irm https://github.com/m62624/plugmem/releases/latest/download/plugmem-cli-installer.ps1 | iex"

Windows .msi

Download plugmem-cli-*.msi from the Releases page. Double-click to install; it registers in "Add or remove programs" for normal upgrades and uninstalls.

cargo binstall

cargo-binstall downloads the prebuilt binary instead of compiling — it just works on every OS/arch above:

$ cargo binstall plugmem-cli

From source

Needs a Rust toolchain. From crates.io:

$ cargo install plugmem-cli

…or from a local checkout of this repo:

$ cargo install --path crates/plugmem-cli
# or, to build without installing:
$ cargo build --release -p plugmem-cli    # binary at target/release/plugmem-cli

Uninstall

cargo uninstall plugmem-cli (for cargo install/binstall); brew uninstall plugmem-cli (Homebrew); "Add or remove programs" (.msi). The shell/PowerShell installers ship no uninstaller — remove ~/.cargo/bin/plugmem-cli and ~/.config/plugmem-cli (Windows: %USERPROFILE%\.cargo\bin\plugmem-cli.exe and %LOCALAPPDATA%\plugmem-cli) by hand. See the workspace README for the full matrix.

Which crate do I need?

The CLI is the human/scripting door. A Rust program links the library instead; an agent or another language comes in over a protocol.

What recall does

Recall fuses four sources by reciprocal-rank fusion with a recency boost (tags filter; they are not a source):

Usage

plugmem-cli [--db PATH] [--json] <command>

The database is chosen by, in order: --db PATH, the PLUGMEM_DB environment variable, or ./plugmem.db (created on first write). The engine keeps no clock, so now comes from the system clock at each call.

Fact ids. A fact's id is how you address it in forget, revise, and show. remember prints it on store (remembered fact 3), and recall carries it on every line: the human block renders each fact as - [fN] text … where N is the id (so [f3] → forget 3), and --json exposes the same value as a plain "id" field on each fact. You don't guess an id — you read it back from a recall (or show), then act on it, the usual "find, then change" flow.

Read-only commands (recall, show, stats, export) open the snapshot zero-copy over an mmap (a shared lock, so several may run at once and the whole file is not loaded) — falling back to a normal open if the journal is un-checkpointed. recall uses that fast path only when no embedder is configured, because embedding the query needs the read-write handle. scrub also takes the shared mmap open, so it needs a checkpointed database — run checkpoint (or maintain) first if the journal is dirty.

Examples

# Remember, with a subject entity, a tag, and opaque metadata (a URI to the
# real payload in another store — the engine never interprets it):
plugmem-cli remember "prefers tokio with pinned versions" --entity user --tag pref \
    --meta source=chat --meta uri=s3://bucket/note.txt

# Recall — a ranked block ready to paste into a prompt:
plugmem-cli recall "which runtime"

# Bitemporal: correct a fact, then ask what was true earlier.
plugmem-cli remember "lives in Moscow" --entity user      # → fact 0
plugmem-cli revise 0 "lives in Berlin" --entity user
plugmem-cli recall "lives" --entity user --as-of 1700000000000   # → Moscow

# Machine-readable output for tooling / agents:
plugmem-cli --json recall "runtime" --tag pref
plugmem-cli --json stats

# Reclaim space held by forgotten facts. `recall` shows the id as `[fN]`;
# use that N to forget, then compact:
plugmem-cli recall "old runtime note"   # → - [f3] prefers deno … 
plugmem-cli forget 3                     # the 3 from [f3]
plugmem-cli maintain

# Human-readable backup and restore. export streams line by line; import
# streams the file back in batches (one embed round-trip + one fsync each):
plugmem-cli export > backup.jsonl
plugmem-cli --db other.plugmem import backup.jsonl --batch 256

# Integrity & recovery (exit 2 on corruption — scriptable as a gate):
plugmem-cli verify                       # content consistency
plugmem-cli checkpoint && plugmem-cli scrub  # flush journal, then byte-level checksums
plugmem-cli recover agent.recovered.plugmem   # salvage into a clean copy

Interactive mode (repl)

plugmem repl opens the database once and runs commands from stdin (one per line, the same subcommand grammar), keeping the engine resident so each command is host speed instead of a per-command reload. help lists the verbs, exit/quit (or EOF) leaves, and the session checkpoints on exit. This is the read-write session: it holds the writer lock and sees its own writes instantly (read-your-writes), so there is never anything to "refresh".

$ plugmem-cli repl
plugmem> remember "prefers tokio"
plugmem> recall runtime
plugmem> exit

plugmem repl --read-only is a separate, observe-only session for watching a database that another process is writing. It opens a shared, zero-copy mmap over the last published snapshot (it does not take the writer lock and does not write), so only the read verbs run — recall, show, stats, export, verify. It adds two cross-process freshness verbs:

These two verbs exist only in --read-only. A normal (writer) repl and every one-shot command already see the newest data — read-your-writes, or a fresh open per command — so refreshing there is meaningless and is not offered. --read-only requires a checkpointed database (an un-checkpointed writer is refused): run checkpoint in the writing process first.

$ plugmem-cli repl --read-only        # in a second terminal, while a writer runs
plugmem(ro)> generation
generation 7
plugmem(ro)> recall runtime           # answers as of generation 7
plugmem(ro)> refresh                   # the writer has checkpointed since
refreshed → generation 9
plugmem(ro)> recall runtime           # now answers as of generation 9
plugmem(ro)> exit

Configuration

Optional config.toml, found by --config PATH, then $PLUGMEM_CONFIG, then $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/plugmem/config.toml (all optional — the CLI works with none). Precedence overall is flag > environment > config file > default.

[engine]
dim = 768              # embedding size (0 = vectors off); other Config
                       # size fields: max_bytes, max_text, shards_* …

[embedder]             # default: none — lexical/tags/graph/time still work
kind = "ollama"        # ollama | openai | lmstudio | vllm | llamacpp | none
url = "http://localhost:11434/v1"
model = "nomic-embed-text"
api_key_env = "OPENAI_API_KEY"   # env var holding the bearer token (openai)

[maintenance]
snapshot_every_ops = 1024
snapshot_journal_bytes = 4194304
maintain_every_forgets = 100     # optional auto-purge
batch_size = 128                 # facts per `import` batch (--batch overrides)

import streams the file in batches of batch_size (default 128; --batch N overrides it): each batch is a single embedder round-trip and a single journal fsync, so a bulk load with an embedder makes one HTTP call per batch instead of one per fact, and the file is never fully read into memory. Larger batches mean fewer round-trips but a bigger request body and more memory per batch.

The embedder is what unlocks the vector recall source: with kind = "none" (the default) remember/recall still answer from lexical, tag, graph and temporal evidence, but no embeddings are computed. One OpenAI-compatible client covers Ollama, OpenAI, LM Studio, vLLM and llama.cpp-server. $PLUGMEM_EMBEDDER overrides [embedder].kind.

Exit codes

Scriptable as a gate:

Lifecycle — open per command

Each invocation is a short-lived process: it opens the database file, runs one command, and exits — the process is the session boundary, so there is no explicit open/close and nothing to keep open between calls. This is the same model as sqlite3, git and most file-backed tools: run → one operation → done. Two invocations that happen to overlap in that brief window collide on the lock (the second gets exit 1); back to back, they never do.

Opening reads the snapshot into memory and replays the journal, so on a large database each command pays that load. For a memory of tens of thousands of facts it is milliseconds; if you need many operations against a big memory without re-loading each time, that is the long-lived handle case — embed plugmem-host's Database in your process (open once, call many verbs, all in RAM), or run the MCP server, which keeps the memory resident. The CLI deliberately does not: it trades a per-command load for a stateless, scriptable tool.

How much a memory weighs — the byte cost of a fact, an edge or a vector, and where each structure tops out — is tabulated in plugmem-core's Capacity — what weighs what; it applies verbatim to a file the CLI opens.

Concurrency

One database file is a single-writer resource: plugmem-cli takes an exclusive lock for the length of the (short-lived) command, so a second plugmem-cli — or an MCP server holding the same file — is refused with exit 1 rather than corrupting it. See the host concurrency model.

License

MIT.