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Troubleshooting & FAQ

Quick orientation lives on grimoireapp.dev/help/; this page goes deeper for docs.grimoireapp.dev readers.

Ollama and the assistant

Symptoms: Chat errors, “unavailable” messages, or embeddings never finishing.

Checks:

  1. Is Ollama running? From a terminal, ollama serve if you do not use a background service.
  2. Did you pull the chat model you selected and the embedding model from Settings → LLM? Defaults often include nomic-embed-text for embeddings — run ollama pull <name> for whatever you configured.
  3. After changing the embedding model, did you run the clear index & re-index flow? Old vectors are not compatible across models.

Structured error kinds (OllamaUnavailable, EmbeddingFailed) and the authoritative table live in AI assistant — Common errors.

RAG returns nothing useful

Is this normal sometimes? Yes — retrieval depends on indexes, toggles, and whether content is unlocked.

Checks:

  1. In chat, confirm “Use notes” (and any other context sources you expect) are on (AI assistant).
  2. Run search (Ctrl+F) on the same keywords — if semantic search is empty, you may still be re-indexing or using the wrong embedding model.
  3. Locked folders and a locked vault exclude ciphertext from normal flows — unlock before expecting RAG hits inside encrypted scopes (Privacy & security).

Wikipedia offline, catalogue, or indexing

Symptoms: “No internet”, catalogue fetch fails, or indexing stalls/errors.

Checks:

  1. Settings → Wikipedia — confirm storage path is set before downloading bundles.
  2. Fetch catalogue requires outbound HTTPS to discover bundles; reading articles and indexing use local CPU and Ollama once a .zim is on disk.
  3. After changing the embedding model and re-indexing notes, the LLM settings UI reminds you to re-index Wikipedia (and file scanner) from their own panels.

See Settings glossary — Wikipedia and Views — Wikipedia.

File Scanner permissions and paths

Symptoms: “Could not add folder”, scan errors, or stale files after you moved things.

Checks:

  1. You cannot add scan roots inside the vault — use normal vault indexing instead (Getting started).
  2. On some OSes, sandboxing / permissions may block reads of certain directories — pick folders your user can read.
  3. If a root moved, the UI surfaces missing path / stale file counts — use Clean up or Remove as appropriate (Settings — File Scanner).

Vault path moved or copied

Grimoire records an absolute vault path in settings. If you relocate the folder:

  1. Prefer graceful path repair flows inside the app if offered on startup (depends on version).
  2. Otherwise, point the app at the new location using the same vault data you copied — avoid running two copies against one SQLite file.

Always back up the vault directory when experimenting.

Performance tips

Installers vs source builds

Installable packages ship on Download when releases publish them; until then, building from source remains the path documented in Getting started and the app README on GitHub.

Still stuck?