Getting started

This tutorial takes you from nothing to searching your own documents. It takes about two minutes, and nothing in it needs the internet after the install step.

1. Install

On macOS, with Homebrew:

brew install BenyD/tap/hay

On Linux or macOS, with the install script:

curl -fsSL haypile.sh | sh

On Windows, download the zip from releases and put hay.exe on your PATH.

Either way you get one binary called hay. The embedding model that powers semantic search is already inside it. There is nothing else to download, ever.

Check it works:

hay --version

2. Index a folder

Point Haypile at any folder with documents in it. PDF, docx, Markdown, and plain text are indexed; everything else is ignored.

hay add ~/Documents

You will see each file scroll by, then a summary:

Indexed 214 files (1,892 chunks), 0 unchanged.
Embedded 1,892 chunks for semantic search (bundled/all-MiniLM-L6-v2).
Try: hay search "something you remember"

Two things happened quietly here. First, everything went into a single SQLite file at ~/.haypile/haypile.db; there is no server to configure and no database to babysit. Second, a small background daemon started and is now watching the folder, so any file you save becomes searchable within seconds.

3. Search

Search for an idea, not just exact words:

hay search "agreement cancellation"

 1. ~/Documents/contracts/vendor-deal.docx · chunk 2
    Termination

    Either party may terminate this Agreement with sixty days written notice.
 2. ~/Documents/contracts/meridian-msa.pdf · page 4
    Either party may terminate for convenience upon sixty (60) days prior
    written notice.

Neither result contains the words "agreement cancellation". That is semantic search doing its job. Exact identifiers work too, and they match exactly:

hay search "2024-CV-01847"

Every result cites its source: the file, and for PDFs the page. You can always check the original.

4. Prove it stays private

hay status

Daemon:   running (0.1.0, up 42s)
Index:    ~/.haypile/haypile.db
Indexed:  1 sources, 214 files, 1,892 chunks
Model:    bundled/all-MiniLM-L6-v2
Outbound connections: 0 (your documents stay on this machine)

That last line is measured, not asserted. Haypile counts its own network connections and reports them. The target is zero, always.

Where to go next

• Get answers instead of search results: Ask questions with a local LLM
• Let Claude Code or Cursor search your documents: Use Haypile from Claude Code
• Tag a folder and exclude drafts from the index: Configure a folder