Configuration

DocuLayer is configured entirely through environment variables — no config files, no disk reads, no setup required beyond pip install.

Variables

Variable	Default	Description
DOCULAYER_CACHE_TTL	3600	Cache entry lifetime in seconds. After this period, a fresh fetch is triggered on the next request.
DOCULAYER_MAX_CACHE	256	Maximum number of pages in the in-memory cache. When full, the oldest entry is evicted.
DOCULAYER_FETCH_TIMEOUT	12.0	HTTP timeout per request in seconds. Raise for slow sites; lower for stricter latency budgets.
DOCULAYER_MAX_BYTES	524288	Maximum page size to process (512 KB). Pages larger than this are truncated before parsing.
DOCULAYER_MAX_WORDS	400	Maximum words per returned section. Longer sections are trimmed at word boundaries.

Setting Variables

Shell (one-off)

DOCULAYER_CACHE_TTL=7200 doculayer search "validators" --source pydantic

Shell (persistent, bash/zsh)

export DOCULAYER_CACHE_TTL=7200
export DOCULAYER_FETCH_TIMEOUT=20.0

.env file

DocuLayer loads a .env file from the current working directory automatically (via python-dotenv):

# .env
DOCULAYER_CACHE_TTL=7200
DOCULAYER_MAX_CACHE=512
DOCULAYER_FETCH_TIMEOUT=20.0

MCP server (IDE config)

Pass environment variables to the MCP process through your IDE's MCP config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "doculayer": {
      "command": "doculayer",
      "args": ["mcp"],
      "env": {
        "DOCULAYER_CACHE_TTL": "7200",
        "DOCULAYER_FETCH_TIMEOUT": "20.0"
      }
    }
  }
}

Storage Guarantee

DocuLayer never writes to disk.

• All fetched pages go into a TTLCache[FetchResult] in process memory
• Cache entries expire after DOCULAYER_CACHE_TTL seconds (default: 1 hour)
• On process restart, the cache is empty — nothing persisted
• Safe for privacy-sensitive environments; docs can never go stale past the TTL

There is no database, no local files, no .cache directory. If the process exits, the cache is gone.