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Environment Variables for NeMo Retriever Library

The following are the environment variables that you can use to configure NeMo Retriever Library. Set them in the process environment before you run the public SDK or the retriever CLI. The SDK and CLI do not load a working-directory .env file automatically.

If you keep values in a .env file, source that file into the current shell first:

set -a
source .env
set +a

On Windows PowerShell, set the variables in the session, for example $env:NVIDIA_API_KEY = "nvapi-...". Refer to Authentication and API keys.

General Environment Variables

Name Example Description
HF_ACCESS_TOKEN - A token for Hugging Face Hub downloads when your runtime needs one. The default chunking tokenizer is public; refer to Token-based splitting for container caching and offline behavior.
INGEST_LOG_LEVEL - DEBUG
- INFO
- WARNING
- ERROR
- CRITICAL
The log level for the ingest service, which controls the verbosity of the logging output.
NVIDIA_API_KEY nvapi-*************
An authorized build.nvidia.com API key, used to interact with NVIDIA-hosted NIMs. Create through build.nvidia.com or through NGC.
NGC_API_KEY The key that NIM microservices in the cluster use to access NGC resources.
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT http://otel-collector:4317
The endpoint for the OpenTelemetry exporter, used for sending telemetry data.
OTEL_METRICS_EXPORTER otlp The retriever service metrics exporter. Set to none to disable OpenTelemetry metric export while retaining other supported telemetry.
OTEL_METRIC_EXPORT_INTERVAL 5000 The metric export interval in milliseconds for Helm deployments. Set a larger value to reduce export frequency.