Command-line options

General Options

General help

—help

-h

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

To make use of the startup options from a program, the option —dump-optionswill print out all options in JSON format and then exits.

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 astring Variable occurs in the value, it is replaced by the correspondingenvironment 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 willattempt to first locate a file named ~/.arango/arangod.conf in the user’s homedirectory.

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

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

Each option is specified on a separate line in the form:

  1. key = value

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

  1. [log]
  2. level = trace

rather than specifying

  1. log.level = trace

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

  1. [section]
  2. param=value

Whitespace around = is ignored in the configuration file. Do not put spacesaround additional = in the parameter value however. The following exampleshows the correct way to specify a log level of trace for the topic startup:

  1. log.level = startup=trace

Note that there is no whitespace between startup and =, and also not =and trace.

Where one section may occur multiple times, and the last occurance of paramwill become the final value. In case of parameters being vectors, multipleoccurance 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 withone or more hash symbols (#).

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

  1. -c none

or

  1. --configuration none

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