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clawsqlite (knowledge)

Languages: English | 中文说明

clawsqlite is a CLI toolbox for SQLite‑based applications in OpenClaw. The first built‑in application is a local Markdown + SQLite knowledge base.

This repo currently focuses on the knowledge app:

  • commands are exposed under clawsqlite knowledge ... for users/skills.

A local Markdown + SQLite knowledge base for OpenClaw, designed for both humans and agents.

The knowledge app helps you:

  • Ingest URLs or raw text as Markdown files + SQLite records
  • Run fast full‑text search over your notes and scraped articles
  • Optionally enable vector search via an external embedding service
  • Regenerate titles/summaries/tags via heuristics or a small LLM
  • Keep the KB healthy with explicit maintenance commands (reindex/check/fix + maintenance prune/gc)

Status: already used in real OpenClaw setups. The schema and CLI are kept small and stable on purpose.

1. Features

  • Pure SQLite backend
    • articles table as source of truth
    • articles_fts FTS5 table for full‑text search
    • articles_vec vec0 table for vector search (optional)
  • Markdown storage
    • Each article is stored as articles/<id>__<slug>.md
    • Markdown files include a small METADATA header + MARKDOWN body section
  • Configurable root
    • All data lives under a single root directory
    • DB and articles dir default to <root>/knowledge.sqlite3 and <root>/articles (see env overrides below)
  • Embeddings + LLM (optional)
    • Embeddings: OpenAI‑compatible /v1/embeddings API
    • Small LLM: OpenAI‑compatible /v1/chat/completions API
  • Tag generation & search ranking
    • Tags are generated from article content via heuristics or a small LLM
    • When jieba is installed, tags are ordered by importance using TextRank/TF‑IDF (and optionally a semantic centrality rerank when embeddings are enabled)
    • Search ranking uses tag/query matching as an additional signal on top of FTS and vector similarity
  • CLI first
    • Simple subcommands: ingest, search, show, export, update, delete, reindex

2. Requirements

The knowledge app expects an environment similar to the OpenClaw container:

  • Python 3.10+ with sqlite3 and FTS5 enabled
  • Python dependencies:
    • jieba (optional but strongly recommended for Chinese tag extraction)
    • pypinyin (optional; used to generate pinyin slugs for CJK titles)
  • sqlite extensions (optional but recommended):
    • libsimple.so (tokenizer simple) for better CJK tokenization
    • vec0.so from sqlite-vec
  • Network access to your embedding / small LLM HTTP endpoints (if you enable those features)

The repo assumes these paths by default (you can override them):

  • Tokenizer extension: /usr/local/lib/libsimple.so
  • vec0 extension: auto-discovered under /app/node_modules/**/vec0.so or system lib dirs

In a fresh environment you typically need to:

  • Install jieba via pip:

    pip install jieba

  • For libsimple.so and vec0.so:

    • In the OpenClaw container these are preinstalled.
    • On a custom system you can either:
      • Use distro packages if available (check your Linux distribution), or
      • Build from source following the upstream docs:
    • If these extensions are missing, the knowledge app will automatically degrade to:
      • SQLite built‑in tokenizer for FTS
      • If jieba is available, optionally pre-segment CJK text in Python for better Chinese recall (controlled by CLAWSQLITE_FTS_JIEBA=auto|on|off)
      • FTS‑only mode when vec0 is unavailable.

3. Installation

3.1 From PyPI (recommended for general use)

Once published, the simplest way to use clawsqlite is via PyPI:

pip install clawsqlite

# Then
clawsqlite knowledge --help

This installs the clawsqlite console script so you can call the CLI from anywhere in your environment.

3.2 From source (development / OpenClaw workspace)

Clone the repo:

git clone git@github.com:ernestyu/clawsqlite.git
cd clawsqlite

(Inside OpenClaw’s workspace this repo may already be present at /home/node/.openclaw/workspace/clawsqlite.)

You can run the knowledge app via the main shell entrypoint:

# From the repo root
./bin/clawsqlite knowledge --help

# Or explicitly choose a Python binary (e.g. your venv)
CLAWSQLITE_PYTHON=/opt/venv/bin/python ./bin/clawsqlite knowledge --help

The recommended CLI entrypoint for skills/users is:

clawsqlite knowledge ...

Use:

clawsqlite knowledge ...

4. Configuration

4.1 Root & paths

The knowledge app determines its root + DB + articles directory via CLI flags + env + defaults.

Priority for root:

  1. CLI: --root
  2. Env: CLAWSQLITE_ROOT
  3. Default: <current working dir>/knowledge_data

DB path:

  • --db > CLAWSQLITE_DB > <root>/knowledge.sqlite3

Articles dir:

  • --articles-dir > CLAWSQLITE_ARTICLES_DIR > <root>/articles

4.2 Project .env

A project‑level .env file is the primary configuration source. Start from the example:

cp ENV.example .env
# then edit .env

ENV.example contains fields like:

# Embedding service (required for vector search)
EMBEDDING_BASE_URL=https://embed.example.com/v1
EMBEDDING_MODEL=your-embedding-model
EMBEDDING_API_KEY=sk-your-embedding-key
CLAWSQLITE_VEC_DIM=1024

# Small LLM (optional)
SMALL_LLM_BASE_URL=https://llm.example.com/v1
SMALL_LLM_MODEL=your-small-llm
SMALL_LLM_API_KEY=sk-your-small-llm-key

# Root override (optional)
# CLAWSQLITE_ROOT=/path/to/knowledge_root
# CLAWSQLITE_DB=/path/to/knowledge.sqlite3
# CLAWSQLITE_ARTICLES_DIR=/path/to/articles

At runtime, clawsqlite knowledge ... (and python -m clawsqlite_cli) will auto‑load a project‑level .env from the current working directory. Existing environment variables are not overridden. In OpenClaw containers this is usually done via the agent’s env config instead of editing .env.

4.3 Embedding configuration

Embeddings are used for vector search (articles_vec) and can be disabled if you only want FTS.

Required env (typically via .env):

  • EMBEDDING_MODEL – model name used by your embedding endpoint
  • EMBEDDING_BASE_URL – base URL, e.g. https://embed.example.com/v1
  • EMBEDDING_API_KEY – bearer token
  • CLAWSQLITE_VEC_DIM – embedding dimension (e.g. 1024 for BAAI/bge-m3)

The knowledge app will:

  • Use these env vars in clawsqlite_knowledge.embed.get_embedding() (via httpx POST to /v1/embeddings)
  • Use CLAWSQLITE_VEC_DIM to define embedding float[DIM] in articles_vec

If any of these are missing, vector features are treated as disabled:

  • embedding_enabled() returns False
  • ingest will not call the embedding API
  • search in mode=hybrid will auto‑downgrade to FTS‑only and print a NEXT hint

4.4 Tag generation & semantic rerank

By default the knowledge app tries to keep title, summary, and tags reasonably populated using heuristics and (optionally) a small LLM.

Tag generation has a few modes controlled by CLAWSQLITE_TAGS_SEMANTIC:

  • auto (default):
    • If both Embedding and jieba are available, use TextRank/TF‑IDF to pick candidates and then apply a semantic centrality rerank so tags closer to the article’s main theme float to the top.
    • If jieba is available but embeddings are not, use pure TextRank/TF‑IDF; tag order still reflects importance.
    • If jieba is not available, fall back to a lightweight keyword extractor and emit a NEXT hint suggesting you install jieba.
  • on: force semantic centrality rerank when Embedding + jieba are both available.
  • off: disable semantic rerank; always use the non‑semantic behavior for the current environment.

Search ranking also uses tags as a small but important signal:

  • When jieba is available (tags are ordered by importance), we compute a continuous tag match score in [0,1] based on how many query keywords exactly match the top tags and how early they appear.
  • When jieba is not available, we fall back to a simple 0/1 bonus for any exact tag match, to avoid over‑interpreting a noisy tag order.

For FTS queries we also extract a small set of keywords from the natural-language query using the same TextRank + optional semantic centrality pipeline as tag generation (when provider=openclaw). When jieba is missing, query keyword extraction falls back to a lightweight heuristic extractor and emits a NEXT: hint suggesting pip install jieba.

The final hybrid score is a weighted blend of signals::

score = w_vec * vec_score + w_fts * fts_score
        + w_tag * tag_score + w_priority * priority_bonus
        + w_recency * recency_bonus

By default we use::

CLAWSQLITE_SCORE_WEIGHTS=vec=0.55,fts=0.25,tag=0.15,priority=0.03,recency=0.02

which roughly means:

  • ~55% vector similarity for deep semantic anchoring
  • ~25% BM25 keywords for textual sanity checks
  • ~15% tag match as your explicit “author intent” signal
  • ~3% priority as a manual pinning mechanism
  • ~2% recency to keep new knowledge slightly favored without dominating

You can override these weights via CLAWSQLITE_SCORE_WEIGHTS (see ENV.example for details).

4.4 Small LLM configuration (optional)

For better titles/summaries/tags you can configure a small LLM endpoint:

SMALL_LLM_BASE_URL=https://llm.example.com/v1
SMALL_LLM_MODEL=your-small-llm
SMALL_LLM_API_KEY=sk-your-small-llm-key

Then use --gen-provider llm when ingesting or updating records. The knowledge app will call an OpenAI‑compatible chat completions API to generate title, summary, and tags.

If these env vars are not set, provider=openclaw uses heuristics only (no network calls).

4.5 Scraper configuration

The knowledge app does not implement web scraping itself. For --url ingest it runs an external scraper command, configured via:

  • CLI: --scrape-cmd
  • Env: CLAWSQLITE_SCRAPE_CMD

Recommended usage:

CLAWSQLITE_SCRAPE_CMD="node /path/to/scrape.js --some-flag"

The knowledge app will:

  • Load this value from .env (stripping outer quotes)
  • Use shlex.split() to build argv (no shell=True by default)
  • Append the URL as the last argument if you don’t use {url}

Scraper output formats:

  • New format (recommended):

    --- METADATA ---
Title: Some article title
Author: Someone
...

--- MARKDOWN ---
# Markdown heading
Body...

  • Old format (still supported):

    Title: Some article title
# Markdown heading
Body...

The knowledge app will parse these into title and markdown body.

5. Quickstart

5.1 Minimal setup

  1. Clone & cd

    git clone git@github.com:ernestyu/clawsqlite.git
cd clawsqlite

  2. （可选）在你的外层环境中配置好根目录和 Embedding/LLM 相关 env，或 直接在运行时通过 --root/--db/--articles-dir 传入。这里不再强依赖 项目内置 .env 加载逻辑。

  3. First ingest (text) – this also creates the DB and basic tables:

    clawsqlite knowledge ingest \
  --text "Hello clawsqlite" \
  --title "First note" \
  --category dev \
  --tags test \
  --gen-provider off \
  --json

    This will:

    • Create <root>/knowledge.sqlite3
    • Create <root>/articles/000001__first-note.md
    • Index the record in FTS (and vec if embedding is configured)

  4. Search it back:

    clawsqlite knowledge search "Hello" --mode fts --json

    You should see the record you just created.

5.2 Ingest a URL

Assuming you have a scraper command set in .env:

clawsqlite knowledge ingest \
  --url "https://example.com/article" \
  --category web \
  --tags example \
  --gen-provider openclaw \
  --json

This will:

  • Call your scraper
  • Extract title + markdown body
  • Optionally generate summary/tags
  • Store everything in DB + markdown

5.3 Updating an existing URL (--update-existing)

If you know a URL’s content has changed and you want to refresh the existing record:

clawsqlite knowledge ingest \
  --url "https://example.com/article" \
  --gen-provider openclaw \
  --update-existing \
  --json

Semantics:

  • If a record with this source_url exists (and is not deleted), and --update-existing is set:
    • The knowledge app updates that record’s title / summary / tags / category / priority
    • Keeps the same id
    • Rewrites the markdown file
    • Updates FTS and vec indexes
  • If no such record exists, it behaves like a normal ingest.

Note: source_url has a UNIQUE index for non‑empty, non‑Local values, so each URL maps to at most one active record.

6. CLI Overview

All commands share common flags (--root, --db, --articles-dir, --json, --verbose). Run clawsqlite knowledge <command> --help for full details.

6.1 ingest

clawsqlite knowledge ingest --url URL [options]
clawsqlite knowledge ingest --text TEXT [options]

Key options:

  • --url / --text
  • --title, --summary, --tags, --category, --priority
  • --gen-provider {openclaw,llm,off}
  • --scrape-cmd (or env CLAWSQLITE_SCRAPE_CMD)
  • --update-existing (for URL mode)

6.2 search

clawsqlite knowledge search "query" --mode hybrid --topk 20 --json

Modes:

  • hybrid – combine vec + FTS
  • fts – full‑text only
  • vec – vector only (requires embedding enabled)

Other flags:

  • --candidates – candidate pool before re‑ranking
  • --llm-keywords {auto,on,off} – FTS query expansion
  • --gen-provider – used only if llm-keywords=auto and FTS hits are too few
  • Filters: --category, --tag, --since, --priority, --include-deleted

6.3 show / export / update / delete

  • show – dump one record (optionally with full markdown content)
  • export – write a record to a .md or .json file
  • update – patch fields or regenerate via generator (id/source_url/created_at are treated as read-only)
  • delete – soft delete by default (sets deleted_at); --hard for permanent removal

All of these commands now check that the DB file exists before opening it:

  • If --root/--db or .env point to a non‑existent DB path, they will report:

    ERROR: db not found at /path/to/db. Check --root/--db or .env configuration.

    instead of silently creating an empty DB and then failing with id not found.

6.4 reindex

Maintenance operations:

  • reindex --check – report missing fields/indexes
  • reindex --fix-missing – regen fields/indexes using current generator
  • reindex --rebuild --fts – rebuild FTS index (via clawsqlite index rebuild)
  • reindex --rebuild --vec – clear vec index only (no embedding); use clawsqlite knowledge embed-from-summary to refill embeddings.

The check output includes flags like vec_available and embedding_enabled to help you understand whether vec features are actually usable for the current DB.

6.5 maintenance

clawsqlite knowledge maintenance prune --days 3 --dry-run

This scans for orphaned files, old .bak_* backups, and broken DB paths. Use --dry-run to preview deletions; maintenance gc is an alias of prune.

7. Notes on File Naming & Titles

Markdown files are named:

<id:06d>__<slugified-title>.md
  • id comes from the articles table
  • slugified-title is derived from the title:
    • If pypinyin is available, CJK tokens are converted to pinyin;
    • ASCII letters/digits are preserved; other symbols become -;
    • Repeated - are collapsed; empty results fall back to untitled.

For CJK titles, the filename is typically a pinyin‑based slug. If pypinyin is not installed, it may fall back to untitled. This does not affect functionality:

  • The real title is stored in the DB
  • Search operates on DB fields and FTS, not filenames

We may refine this strategy in future (e.g. supporting CJK slugs or ID‑only filenames), but the current format is stable and works well with existing tools.

8. 中文说明（简要）

clawsqlite 提供的知识库应用是一个基于 SQLite + FTS5 + sqlite-vec 的本地知识库 CLI，主要特性：

  • 文章元数据存到 articles 表，全文索引用 FTS5，向量检索用 sqlite-vec
  • 每篇文章同时会写成一个 markdown 文件，包含 --- METADATA --- 和 --- MARKDOWN ---
  • 支持：
    • ingest：从 URL 或纯文本入库
    • search：FTS / 向量 / 混合模式
    • show / export / update / delete / reindex / maintenance

快速开始

  1. 克隆仓库：

    git clone git@github.com:ernestyu/clawsqlite.git
cd clawsqlite

  2. 在运行环境中配置好 CLAWSQLITE_ROOT / CLAWSQLITE_DB 等路径以及 EMBEDDING_* / SMALL_LLM_* 等变量，或直接在命令行通过 --root/--db/--articles-dir 传入。这一步通常在 OpenClaw 的 agent 配置中完成。

  3. 第一次入库（文本）：

    clawsqlite knowledge ingest \
  --text "你好，clawsqlite" \
  --title "第一次笔记" \
  --category test \
  --tags demo \
  --gen-provider off

  4. 搜索：

    clawsqlite knowledge search "clawsqlite" --mode fts

URL 重抓 & 刷新

当你知道某篇文章更新了，并且之前已经用 URL 入过库，可以用：

clawsqlite knowledge ingest \
  --url "https://example.com/article" \
  --update-existing

行为：

  • source_url 已存在时：更新同一条记录（title/summary/tags/category/priority），并重写 markdown + 索引
  • source_url 不存在时：正常新增一条记录

articles.source_url 对非空、非 Local 的 URL 有唯一约束，保证一个 URL 对应最多一条记录。

如果你在使用过程中遇到问题或有改进建议，欢迎在仓库里开 issue / PR。

License

MIT © Ernest Yu

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Local Markdown + SQLite knowledge base for OpenClaw (humans and agents)

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