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Configuration & Admin

This page is the summary. Each section below has a page of its own:

Lifeboat separates deployment-time configuration — environment variables, set once by whoever runs the host — from runtime administration, which is everything on the Configuration and Users pages and takes effect on save.

Users and roles

Section titled “Users and roles”

Users → Add User. Four roles, each a superset of the one below:

Role Can
Viewer Read everything: dashboard, models, servers, clusters, audit log. Change nothing.
Operator Everything a viewer can, plus start, stop and create servers, and download models. Day-to-day operation.
Admin Plus users, API keys, configuration, licence activation, and revealing a stored key.
Superadmin Plus the sealed-secret operations used by confidential computing.

Give applications an API key, not a user account — keys are scoped for inference and are revocable individually. See API and automation.

First run

Section titled “First run”

A fresh deployment asks you to create the first administrator in the browser. There is no default password shipped in the product: the container generates one per install if you do not set LIFEBOAT_ADMIN_PASSWORD, and writes it where the deployment can read it. A product that ships with known credentials is a product that runs with known credentials.

Change a password from the user menu at the top right. An administrator can reset another user’s from the Users page.

Locked out

Section titled “Locked out”

If no administrator can sign in, set LIFEBOAT_ADMIN_PASSWORD on the container and restart it. For the desktop app, quit it and start it again — it re-runs first-run setup if no account exists.

The routing mode card

Section titled “The routing mode card”

The one runtime setting most worth understanding, because it changes how the deployment behaves under load. Four modes, explained with their trade-offs in Clusters and load balancing. It applies fleet-wide, takes effect immediately on save, and the card polls live so you can watch Hybrid switch between its two states.

Unset or unrecognised means Max concurrency (since 2.2.60; Superfast before). Fresh installs and upgrades with no mode set both land there.

The system prompt

Section titled “The system prompt”

A system prompt set here is injected into every chat request that does not carry its own. It is applied correctly on both the OpenAI-compatible and the Anthropic-compatible endpoint, which have incompatible ways of expressing one — so it does not silently vanish on the second.

Environment variables worth knowing

Section titled “Environment variables worth knowing”

Set on the container (Compose environment:, Helm values, or the AMI’s overrides file). Every one has a working default; the full list is in .env.example.

Sizing and paths

Variable Default Notes
LIFEBOAT_MODELS_DIR /models Where weights live. Persist it.
LIFEBOAT_DATA_DIR — Registry, audit log, logs, licence. Persist it — the licence grace clock and cluster identity live here.
LIFEBOAT_SHM_SIZE 8gb Shared memory. Required for tensor parallelism above 1, and fixed at container creation — changing it needs the container recreated.
LIFEBOAT_PYTHON python3.12 Must match the image’s interpreter. A stale value breaks a bind mount in the Compose file.

Router

Variable Default Notes
LIFEBOAT_LB_QUEUE_ENABLED on Queue instead of rejecting at capacity. The Queue-all routing mode turns this on regardless.
LIFEBOAT_LB_QUEUE_TTL_SEC 120 How long a request may wait before a 504.
LIFEBOAT_LB_SUPERFAST_CAP 4 Per-server limit in Superfast, and in Hybrid while quiet.
LIFEBOAT_TTS_MAX_CONCURRENCY 2 Text-to-speech runs a subprocess per request; each reloads the model, so parallelism costs memory without adding throughput.

Startup timing

Variable Default Notes
LIFEBOAT_STARTING_TIMEOUT_SEC 900 How long a server may be starting.
LIFEBOAT_STARTING_STALL_SEC 300 Silence in its log that counts as stuck. Both must elapse — a slow start writes to its log, a hung one does not.

Licensing and telemetry

Variable Default Notes
LIFEBOAT_LICENSE_FILE — Path to an offline .lic to import at boot.
LIFEBOAT_TELEMETRY on off stops the census. The licence check-in continues — see below.
LIFEBOAT_GRACE_HOURS 24 The grace window. Not the paid trial.

Logging

LIFEBOAT_LOG_LEVEL defaults to INFO, and at that level the control plane explains its own automatic decisions — the derived memory fraction and why, measured footprints, engine auto-routing, embedding detection, parser corrections. If you are trying to understand why Lifeboat chose something, this is where the answer is.

What the deployment sends out

Section titled “What the deployment sends out”

A licensed deployment checks in with its licence key, cluster id, node count and version. An unlicensed one reports a daily census with no key. Both include a short hardware description, sent once per distinct configuration.

No model names, prompts, completions or token counts are ever collected. LIFEBOAT_TELEMETRY=off stops the census; the licence check-in continues, because demonstrating that a licence is bound to one cluster is contractual rather than telemetry. An air-gapped licence sends nothing at all. See Licensing.

Which changes need a restart?

Section titled “Which changes need a restart?”
Change Effect
Routing mode, system prompt, users, keys, weights, concurrency Immediate on save.
Per-server settings Next start of that server.
Environment variables Container restart.
LIFEBOAT_SHM_SIZE Container recreation, not restart.

Upgrading

Section titled “Upgrading”

Stop the stack, pull the new image, start it again, keeping the data volume — the registry, users, keys, audit log and downloaded models all carry across. On NVIDIA the host-setup step is idempotent and safe to re-run after a reboot or driver upgrade.

Note the container images and the desktop app ship on separate cadences, so their version numbers are not expected to match. A desktop version is not a pullable image tag.

Sources and references

Section titled “Sources and references”