Command-line options

General Options

General help

--help

-h

Prints a list of the most common options available and then exits. In order to see all options use --help-all.

Version

--version

-v

Prints the version of the server and exits.

Configuration Files

Options can be specified on the command line or in configuration files. If a string Variable occurs in the value, it is replaced by the corresponding environment variable.

--configuration filename

-c filename

Specifies the name of the configuration file to use.

If this command is not passed to the server, then by default, the server will attempt to first locate a file named ~/.arango/arangod.conf in the user's home directory.

If no such file is found, the server will proceed to look for a file arangod.conf in the system configuration directory. The system configuration directory is platform-specific, and may be changed when compiling ArangoDB yourself. It may default to /etc/arangodb or /usr/local/etc/arangodb. This file is installed when using a package manager like rpm or dpkg. If you modify this file and later upgrade to a new version of ArangoDB, then the package manager normally warns you about the conflict. In order to avoid these warning for small adjustments, you can put local overrides into a file arangod.conf.local.

Only command line options with a value should be set within the configuration file. Command line options which act as flags should be entered on the command line when starting the server.

Whitespace in the configuration file is ignored. Each option is specified on a separate line in the form

key = value

Alternatively, a header section can be specified and options pertaining to that section can be specified in a shorter form

[log]
level = trace

rather than specifying

log.level = trace

So you see in general --section.param value translates to

[section]
param=value

Where one section may occur multiple times, and the last occurance of param will become the final value. In case of parameters being vectors, multiple occurance adds another item to the vector. Vectors can be identified by the ... in the --help output of the binaries.

Comments can be placed in the configuration file, only if the line begins with one or more hash symbols (#).

There may be occasions where a configuration file exists and the user wishes to override configuration settings stored in a configuration file. Any settings specified on the command line will overwrite the same setting when it appears in a configuration file. If the user wishes to completely ignore configuration files without necessarily deleting the file (or files), then add the command line option

-c none

or

--configuration none

When starting up the server. Note that, the word none is case-insensitive.