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Environment Variables

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

Paths and sizing

Section titled “Paths and sizing”
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 for tensor parallelism > 1. Fixed at container creation.
LIFEBOAT_GPU_DEVICE a no-op self-mapping Passes an integrated GPU through, e.g. /dev/dri:/dev/dri. The default is deliberately inert: a hardcoded device that the host lacks makes the container refuse to start.

Router

Section titled “Router”
Variable Default Notes
LIFEBOAT_LB_QUEUE_ENABLED off Queue instead of rejecting at capacity. Queue-all mode forces it on.
LIFEBOAT_LB_QUEUE_TTL_SEC 30 Wait before a 504.
LIFEBOAT_LB_QUEUE_MAX_DEPTH_MULTIPLIER 4 Depth ceiling, times the pool’s total concurrency.
LIFEBOAT_LB_SUPERFAST_CAP 4 Per-server cap in superfast, and in hybrid while quiet.
LIFEBOAT_LB_HYBRID_INFLIGHT / _RATE 10 / 10 Thresholds that flip a hybrid pool busy.
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

Section titled “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. Raising the timeout alone only moves the cliff.

Licensing and telemetry

Section titled “Licensing and telemetry”
Variable Default Notes
LIFEBOAT_LICENSE_FILE — Offline .lic imported at boot.
LIFEBOAT_GRACE_HOURS 24 The grace window. Not the paid trial.
LIFEBOAT_TELEMETRY on off stops the census. The licence check-in continues — see Telemetry.

Multi-node

Section titled “Multi-node”
Variable Notes
LIFEBOAT_CLUSTER_SECRET Shared between control plane and every agent. Mismatch → 401 naming the node.

Logging

Section titled “Logging”

LIFEBOAT_LOG_LEVEL defaults to INFO. 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 asking why Lifeboat chose something, this is where the answer is.

Engines

Section titled “Engines”
Variable Default Notes
LIFEBOAT_LLAMACPP_BIN the bundled engine, or the one lifeboat engine install placed in the data directory Absolute path to a llama-server binary. Needed when you build the engine yourself — on a Linux release older than Ubuntu 24.04, where the prebuilt binary’s glibc floor is not met.

pip package on Windows

Section titled “pip package on Windows”

Required today, and specific to the pip package — the desktop installer and the container image need neither. Set them in the session you start Lifeboat from.

Variable Set to Why
PYTHONIOENCODING utf-8 Without it lifeboat up exits with UnicodeEncodeError: a Windows console encodes stdout as cp1252 and cannot print the startup banner, which happens before the server binds.
HF_HUB_DISABLE_XET 1 Without it a model download can stall at zero bytes or fail with CAS Client Error. Falls back from Hugging Face’s Xet transfer backend to the classic HTTP path.
Terminal window
$env:PYTHONIOENCODING = "utf-8"
$env:HF_HUB_DISABLE_XET = "1"

See pip Quickstart → Windows.

Where to set them

Section titled “Where to set them”
Shape Where
Compose the environment: map
Helm values, rendered into the pod
AMI /etc/lifeboat/overrides.env — survives restarts
Desktop not generally needed

A variable must be named in environment: to reach the process — an .env file alone only provides substitution.

Sources and references

Section titled “Sources and references”