Reference

Reading the console output

Decode the progress bar, the status glyph vocabulary, and the stdout/stderr split.

A bootstrap (or a standalone index / embed / wiki, and the mirror-tier clone / update / branches) prints progress as it goes. Most lines are self-explanatory; a few are worth decoding.

The live progress bar#

One shared renderer is used by every long-running command, so it looks the same everywhere: [████████░░░░] 42/678 (6%) · 12:30 elapsed · ~2:58:14 left · 3.4/min (bar, done/total, percent, elapsed time, estimated time remaining, and rate in items/min). The ETA is a moving-average estimate over recent items (that's what the ~ marks), and it's count-based, each item counts equally rather than being weighted by size. When a run's total isn't known up front, the bar drops the percent/ETA and shows done · elapsed · rate instead, rather than guessing. Across every long-running command (including connect, ingest, and enrich, which don't use the shared bar), the clock only shows up on the bar itself (where there is one) and on section/summary lines; the per-item detail lines scrolling beneath don't repeat it, so they don't flicker as the timestamp ticks over.

One status vocabulary, everywhere#

Every command (mirror-tier clone/update/branches, index, embed, wiki, enrich, ingest, connect, lint, sync) marks each line with the same seven glyphs, so once you know the glyph you know the outcome without reading the rest of the line:

Multi-stage commands (bootstrap and sync) also print ▶ <Phase> section headers (e.g. ▶ Mirror repositories from GitLab, ▶ Audit repositories (health & age)) so a long run reads as sections rather than one undifferentiated scroll, and every long-running command ends with a one-line, glyph-prefixed summary (✓ Embed complete: ..., ✓ Lint: ..., and so on) you can skim straight to.

The stdout / stderr split#

The bar renders on stderr; the per-item result lines below it (✓/⚠ and the like) stay on stdout. That split means contextlake wiki >> run.log (or any stdout redirect) captures clean detail lines with no bar artifacts or \r clutter, since the bar never touches stdout. When output isn't a TTY (piped, cron, a redirected stderr), the bar itself auto-downgrades to periodic plain summary lines instead of repainting in place. When both streams share one terminal (the default interactive case), the bar and the detail lines interleave as the run scrolls (the bar reprints below each new detail line rather than repainting perfectly in place); redirect stdout to a file to keep the bar as a single live line with the detail captured separately.

Decoding specific lines#

• ✓ <repo>: X nodes, Y edges is the incremental indexer's per-repo detail line (stdout; the index progress bar above it lives on stderr). 0 nodes, 0 edges is normal and not an error: that repo has no code in a supported language (config-only, docs-only, IaC/scripts, or empty). Only repos whose HEAD moved are re-indexed; the rest are reported as unchanged.
• Embed complete: 0 vector(s) written (N total in store), M already up to date, embedding is incremental too. 0 written with a large already up to date count means nothing changed since the last run; the N total is the whole store, not this run.
• Fetching 10 files: 100% ... Download complete: 0.00B appears once when the wiki (or built-in embedder) model loads. It is Hugging Face resolving the model repo's files (several GGUF quantizations + tokenizer/config) in your local cache, 0.00B means nothing was downloaded, everything was already cached. It fires once per run at model load, not per repo.
• ✓ <repo>: written (score 0.98), a wiki page passed the review council and was saved. ⚠ <repo>: rejected by council (score 0.31), it did not clear the accept threshold; the indented - accuracy/completeness/clarity: ... lines are the per-lens reasons. unparseable review means the model returned a review the council couldn't score (common with the tiny built-in 0.5B model); those lenses are excluded from the mean rather than counted as zero. A capable backend (--llm ollama/anthropic/openai) produces far fewer rejections, see Model providers.
• contextlake serve --transport http prints its bind URL once it starts listening (✓ MCP server on http://127.0.0.1:8765 (Ctrl-C to stop)), so you don't have to guess the host/port before pointing an editor at it. stdio transport has no address to report and stays quiet on that line.
• graph --overview on an empty store warns instead of reporting silent success. It still writes the (empty) artifact, but now says ⚠ Wrote html (0 nodes, 0 edges) -> ...: the store is empty. followed by a hint to run contextlake index first, instead of logging the same success line it would for a populated graph.
• A single-writer lock message naming another process means two runs targeted one store at once (see the git-hook note under Bootstrap and keep fresh).

Warnings from the model download itself (Hugging Face symlink/auth notices) are silenced; the real progress still shows.

See also#

• Bootstrap and keep fresh
• Index the code graph
• contextlake command reference