YAMS — Yet Another Memory System

Version v0.6.x will focus on improving stability, performance and the CI. All new features will move to the experimental or v0.7.0 branch

Persistent memory for LLMs and apps. Content-addressed storage with dedupe, compression, full-text and vector search.

• SourceHut: https://sr.ht/~trvon/yams/
• GitHub mirror: https://github.com/trvon/yams
• Docs: https://trvon.github.io/yams

What it is

• SHA-256 content-addressed store with block-level dedupe (Rabin)
• Full-text search (SQLite FTS5) and semantic search (embeddings)
• WAL-backed durability, high-throughput I/O, thread-safe

Install

Supported: Linux x86_64/ARM64, macOS x86_64/ARM64

Build with Conan (recommended):

pip install conan
conan profile detect --force
conan install . -of build/yams-release -s build_type=Release -b missing
cmake --preset yams-release
cmake --build --preset yams-release -j
sudo cmake --install build/yams-release && sudo ldconfig

Deps quick refs:

• Linux: libssl-dev sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev protobuf-compiler libncurses-dev ninja-build cmake
• macOS: openssl@3 protobuf sqlite3 ncurses (export OPENSSL_ROOT_DIR=$(brew --prefix openssl@3)) ninja-build cmake

Build options (common): YAMS_BUILD_TESTS=ON|OFF, YAMS_BUILD_BENCHMARKS=ON|OFF, YAMS_ENABLE_PDF=ON|OFF, YAMS_ENABLE_TUI=ON|OFF, YAMS_ENABLE_ONNX=ON|OFF.

Note: Plain CMake without Conan may miss deps. Prefer Conan builds.

Quick start

export YAMS_STORAGE="$HOME/.local/share/yams"
yams init --non-interactive

# add
echo hello | yams add - --tags demo

# search
yams search hello --limit 5

# get
yams list --format minimal --limit 1 | xargs yams get

CLI cheat sheet

# set storage per-run
yams --data-dir /tmp/yams add -

# list (minimal for pipes)
yams list --format minimal | head -3

# fuzzy search
yams search databse --fuzzy --similarity 0.8

# delete preview
yams delete --pattern "*.log" --dry-run

LLM-friendly patterns

# cache web content
curl -s https://example.com | yams add - --tags web,cache --name example.html

# stash code diffs
git diff | yams add - --tags git,diff,$(date +%Y%m%d)

# chain search -> get
hash=$(yams search "topic" --format minimal | head -1); yams get "$hash"

MCP

yams serve  # stdio transport

MCP config (example):

{
  "mcpServers": { "yams": { "command": "/usr/local/bin/yams", "args": ["serve"] } }
}

API (C++)

#include <yams/api/content_store.h>
auto store = yams::api::createContentStore(getenv("YAMS_STORAGE"));
yams::api::ContentMetadata meta{.tags={"code","v1.0"}};
auto r = store->store("file.txt", meta);
auto q = store->search("query", 10);
store->retrieve(hash, "out.txt");

Troubleshooting

Conan: create default profile

conan profile detect --force

PDF support issues: build with -DYAMS_ENABLE_PDF=OFF.

License

Apache-2.0