Guides
Index Your Local Docs
Make a folder of documents searchable with semantic search.
Index Your Local Docs
By the end of this guide, you'll have a folder of local documents indexed and searchable — with results ranked by meaning, not just keywords.
Prerequisites
- Indexed installed
- A folder with documents (Markdown, PDF, DOCX, TXT, HTML, or any supported format)
Create a Collection
Point Indexed at your folder:
indexed index create files -c project-docs -p ~/work/docsIndexing collection 'project-docs'...
Parsed 24 documents
Created 96 chunks
Generated embeddings
✓ Collection 'project-docs' created (96 chunks, 5.1 MB)Indexed will recursively scan the folder, parse every supported file, split documents into chunks, and embed them into a FAISS vector index — all locally.
Filter with Include/Exclude Patterns
To index only specific file types or skip certain files, use regex patterns:
# Only Markdown and text files
indexed index create files -c docs-only -p ~/work/docs \
--include ".*\.md$" --include ".*\.txt$"
# Skip draft files
indexed index create files -c final-docs -p ~/work/docs \
--exclude ".*\.draft\.md$" --exclude ".*WIP.*"Patterns are regular expressions. You can repeat --include and --exclude to specify multiple patterns.
Verify the Collection
indexed index inspect project-docsCollection: project-docs
Type: files
Source: /Users/you/work/docs
Documents: 24
Chunks: 96
Size: 5.1 MB
Created: 2025-03-15 14:30:22Search
indexed index search "deployment process"Results for 'deployment process' (top 5):
1. [project-docs] deploy-guide.md (chunk 1/3)
Score: 0.87
...To deploy to production, first ensure all CI checks pass,
then run the release pipeline from the main branch...
2. [project-docs] runbook.md (chunk 4/6)
Score: 0.79
...If a rollback is needed, revert the last deployment using
the rollback script in the ops/ directory...Additional Options
| Flag | Description |
|---|---|
--force | Overwrite an existing collection with the same name |
--fail-fast | Stop on the first document that fails to parse |
--no-fail-fast | Skip unparseable documents and continue (default) |
--use-cache | Reuse cached parsed documents (default) |
--no-cache | Re-parse all documents from scratch |