Install Anvil

QMD indexes your codebase, documentation, and past sessions so Anvil can inject relevant context into every conversation. It is optional — Anvil runs fine without it — but recommended if you want memory that spans sessions.

1. Install QMD

The Anvil install script installs QMD automatically when Node.js 18+ is present. To install it manually:

2. Index your project

Point QMD at the folders you want it to see. Glob patterns are supported.

3. Keep the index fresh

QMD does not run as a background daemon — it operates on a local SQLite + embedding index that Anvil queries directly. Re-run qmd update && qmd embed whenever you want the index to pick up new files, or set up a periodic refresh:

For a lighter-touch setup, just run qmd update manually when you start a session. The index is on local disk — nothing leaves your machine.

Anvil auto-discovers QMD

Anvil probes for the qmd binary at startup (on $PATH, plus the standard install paths for each OS). When it finds QMD, it polls every 30 seconds for index health and surfaces the status on the rail's MEMORY block alongside the seven memory layers. Anvil also auto-registers a per-session collection for ~/.anvil/history/ and runs qmd update in the background so newly-archived session files become searchable without manual re-indexing.

If qmd is not installed, Anvil silently falls back to its in-process memory layers. There is no error, no warning — QMD is strictly an enhancement.

Use QMD from inside Anvil

QMD also ships an MCP server so you can call it as a tool from any session. Anvil's MCP host wires it up automatically when present:

Learn more: github.com/tobi/qmd