Scripting¶

Elroy is primarily a terminal UI application. For automation and scripting use cases, configure Elroy via environment variables and use the background ingestion feature.

Configuration via Environment Variables¶

All Elroy settings can be set through environment variables prefixed with ELROY_:

# Set the model
export ELROY_CHAT_MODEL=gpt-5

# Set user token for separate memory namespaces in scripts
export ELROY_USER_TOKEN=my_script_user

# Launch elroy
elroy

Background Document Ingestion¶

For workflows that need Elroy to process documents automatically, use background ingestion:

# ~/.elroy/elroy.conf.yaml
background_ingest_enabled: true
background_ingest_paths:
  - ~/documents/
  - ~/notes/
background_ingest_interval_minutes: 60

Shell Scripting¶

Elroy's terminal UI reads from stdin when it is not a TTY, allowing basic piped input. However, interactive scripting workflows are best handled via the slash commands inside the TUI.

For more examples, see the examples directory in the Elroy repository.