Milvus Backends

MFS can use Milvus Lite, self-hosted Milvus, or Zilliz Cloud.

Milvus Lite

Milvus Lite is the default.

[milvus]
uri = "~/.mfs/milvus.db"
collection_name = "mfs_chunks"

Use it when:

• you want zero setup
• you index local folders for yourself
• one writer at a time is enough

Milvus Lite stores the database file under ~/.mfs/ by default.

Self-hosted Milvus

[milvus]
uri = "http://localhost:19530"
collection_name = "mfs_chunks"

Use it when:

• the corpus is larger
• multiple processes or users need the same server
• you already operate Milvus locally or in a cluster

Zilliz Cloud

[milvus]
uri = "https://your-endpoint.zillizcloud.com"
token = "..."
collection_name = "mfs_chunks"

Use it when:

• you want managed Milvus infrastructure
• the index should survive local machine cleanup
• several machines should share the same retrieval backend

The index is still derived from files. If the collection is removed, the recovery path is to re-run mfs add on the source folders.

Collection naming

The default collection name is mfs_chunks. Change it when you need isolated indexes:

mfs config set milvus.collection_name my_project_chunks

account_id is stored on records and can be used to separate logical accounts inside the same collection.