Quickstart: Index Your Team's Knowledge in 5 Minutes

Lightfast helps teams search everything they know. This guide walks you through indexing your first repository and searching your organization's memory.

Lightfast Plans Overview

• Starter – Basic search across your team's documentation.
• Team – Advanced semantic search and decision tracking for $12/user/month.
• Business – Auto-summaries and expertise profiles for larger teams.

See full plan details .

Sign Up & Connect GitHub

To use Lightfast, you'll need to create an account and connect your GitHub repositories. This is the recommended way to get started as it automatically indexes your team's documentation, pull requests, issues, and discussions.

Sign up at lightfast.ai and create a workspace for your team. When you connect your GitHub account via OAuth, you can select which repositories you want Lightfast to remember. Lightfast respects your GitHub permissions—only content you have access to will be indexed.

Once you're set up and your repositories are connected, you can search your team's knowledge in different ways:

• Dashboard search: Use the web interface to search across all your indexed content with natural language queries.
• API integration: Make requests to the Lightfast API from your applications using your API key (see the Authentication guide for details).
• MCP tools: Connect AI agents and tools via the Model Context Protocol to let them query your team's memory automatically.

Create Your Configuration

Lightfast uses a lightfast.yml file to control what gets indexed from your repository. This configuration file lives in your repo root and tells Lightfast exactly which files to remember, how to organize them, and which workspace they belong to.

Add a lightfast.yml file to the root of your repository:

1# Lightfast Configuration
2# Docs: https://lightfast.com/docs/get-started/config
3
4version: 1
5
6# Workspace identifier (optional - auto-detected from GitHub if omitted)
7# workspace: myorg/myrepo
8
9# Store name (unique identifier for this documentation set)
10# - Max 20 characters
11# - Lowercase alphanumeric with hyphens only
12# - No leading/trailing/consecutive hyphens
13# Use different store names across repos to organize knowledge
14store: root-store
15
16# Files to include (glob patterns - repo-relative paths)
17include:
18- "README.md"           # Root README
19- "docs/**/*.md"        # All Markdown in docs/
20- "**/*.mdx"            # All MDX files
21# - "rfcs/**/*"         # Design documents
22# - "docs/**/*.tsx"     # React documentation components
23
24# Files are automatically excluded:
25# - **/node_modules/**
26# - **/.git/**
27# - **/dist/**
28# - **/build/**
29# - **/.next/**
30# - **/.turbo/**

The configuration has three main parts:

• Store name: A unique identifier for this documentation set within your workspace. Use different store names across repositories to organize knowledge (e.g., docs-store, api-store, infra-store). You can then filter searches by store to find exactly what you need.
• Include patterns: Glob patterns that match files to index. Patterns are relative to your repository root and support standard glob syntax (* matches files, ** matches directories recursively).
• Workspace: Optional identifier that links this config to your Lightfast workspace. If omitted, Lightfast auto-detects it from your GitHub repository.

Common directories like node_modules, .git, dist, build, .next, and .turbo are automatically excluded—you don't need to specify them.

Once you've created your lightfast.yml file, commit and push it to your repository:

1git add lightfast.yml
2git commit -m "Add Lightfast configuration"
3git push origin main

Lightfast automatically detects the configuration and starts indexing your repository. Within minutes, your documentation will be searchable across your team's dashboard, API, and MCP tools.

Monitor Indexing & Memory Types

After pushing your lightfast.yml configuration, Lightfast automatically starts building your team's memory. The platform indexes multiple types of content from your connected repositories, creating a searchable knowledge base that respects your GitHub permissions.

What Lightfast indexes:

• Documentation: READMEs, wikis, docs folders, and any files matching your include patterns
• Pull Requests: Code changes, review comments, and discussion threads
• Issues: Bug reports, feature requests, project tracking, and comments
• Discussions: GitHub Discussions, decision rationale, and context
• People & Ownership: Contributors, code owners, and subject matter experts

Track your indexing progress at lightfast.ai/dashboard . You'll see real-time updates as documents are processed, and most repositories complete indexing within 5-10 minutes. All team members in your workspace can view progress and start searching as soon as content becomes available.

Search Your Team's Knowledge

Once indexing completes, you can search your organization's memory from the dashboard, chat interface, or API. Lightfast understands natural language queries and returns answers with citations showing exactly where information came from.

Try these example queries:

• "How does authentication work in our API?" — Find architecture decisions and implementation details
• "What's our deployment process?" — Discover documented workflows and recent changes
• "Why did we choose PostgreSQL over MongoDB?" — Trace decision rationale from discussions and PRs
• "Who owns the payment service?" — Identify code owners and active contributors

Every answer includes source citations with links to the original documents, pull requests, or discussions. You can verify the information and dive deeper into the full context. Search works across all indexed content—documentation, code discussions, issues, and decisions—giving you a complete view of your team's knowledge.

FAQ