Configuration

Configuration

Sentinel is configured via sentinel.toml in the repository root. All settings are optional — Sentinel uses sensible defaults.

Create a config file

sentinel init /path/to/repo

Full reference

[sentinel]
# Model provider: "ollama" (default), "openai", or "azure"
provider = "ollama"

# Model name for LLM judge and LLM-assisted detectors
model = "qwen3.5:4b"

# Ollama API URL (only used when provider = "ollama")
ollama_url = "http://localhost:11434"

# API base URL (for openai/azure providers)
api_base = ""

# Environment variable containing the API key (for openai/azure)
api_key_env = ""

# Database path (relative to repo root)
db_path = ".sentinel/sentinel.db"

# Output directory for reports
output_dir = ".sentinel"

# Skip the LLM judge step (use raw detector findings)
skip_judge = false

# Skip LLM-assisted detectors (semantic-drift, test-coherence)
skip_llm = false

# Embedding model for semantic context (empty = disabled)
embed_model = ""

# Embedding chunk size and overlap
embed_chunk_size = 50
embed_chunk_overlap = 10

# Custom detectors directory (empty = built-in only)
detectors_dir = ""

# LLM context window size in tokens
num_ctx = 2048

# Model capability tier: "none", "basic", "standard", "advanced"
# Controls which LLM features activate. Higher tiers unlock richer analysis.
model_capability = "basic"

# Minimum confidence threshold for report inclusion (0.0 = show all)
min_confidence = 0.0

# Explicit list of detectors to run (mutually exclusive with disabled_detectors)
# enabled_detectors = ["todo-scanner", "complexity", "dep-audit"]

# Detectors to skip (mutually exclusive with enabled_detectors)
# disabled_detectors = ["lint-runner"]

Capability tiers

Tier	Models	What it enables
none	—	Deterministic detectors only, no LLM
basic	4B+ (Qwen3.5 4B, Phi-3.5)	LLM judge, semantic-drift, test-coherence (binary signals)
standard	9B+ or small cloud (GPT-5.4-nano)	Enhanced analysis, finding cluster synthesis, richer prompts
advanced	Frontier cloud	Deep semantic analysis (reserved for future use)

Per-detector provider overrides

Route specific detectors to different models or providers. See Per-Detector Providers for details.

[sentinel.detector_providers.semantic-drift]
provider = "openai"
model = "gpt-4o-mini"
api_base = "https://api.openai.com/v1"
api_key_env = "OPENAI_API_KEY"
model_capability = "standard"

CLI overrides

CLI flags override sentinel.toml values for a single run:

sentinel scan /repo --model qwen3.5:8b --capability standard --skip-judge

Environment variables

Variable	Used by
SENTINEL_GITHUB_TOKEN	create-issues — GitHub API token
SENTINEL_GITHUB_OWNER	create-issues — GitHub repo owner
SENTINEL_GITHUB_REPO	create-issues — GitHub repo name
Value of api_key_env	Provider authentication (e.g., OPENAI_API_KEY)