Files and environment

Where the app keeps things

The app's own folder is community-lab-ide in your system's application-data folder:

System	The app's folder
Linux	~/.config/community-lab-ide (or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/community-lab-ide)
Windows	%APPDATA%\community-lab-ide
macOS	~/Library/Application Support/community-lab-ide

In it:

Path	What it holds
data/community.db	The engine's database: the dialogue cache, and the experiments, Monte Carlo runs and pooled exports it has kept
data/workspace.json	The workspace you had open, and up to twelve recent ones
logs/server.log	The engine's log (moved to server.log.1 when it passes 5 MB)
logs/main.log	The app's log (on macOS, in ~/Library/Logs/community-lab-ide/ instead)
window.json	The window's size and position

Help › Show Data Folder and Help › Show Logs open them. The settings, the scenario and the API keys are kept in the window's own storage in the same folder.

Your workspaces are wherever you put them. A new sample workspace goes in Community Lab in your Documents folder (or your home folder), then Community Lab 2 and so on. Inside a workspace, the app writes experiment results to results/<title>-<date>/ and exports to exports/<name>-<date>/.

The AppImage's updates download to ~/.cache/community-lab-ide-updater/.

Uninstalling leaves all of this in place; delete the app's folder to remove it.

Environment variables

The desktop app sets the engine's port, address and folders itself. These are for special cases, and for running the engine from source:

Variable	Default	What it does
COMMUNITY_WORKERS	half the machine's threads, at most 8	How many provinces the worker pool runs at once. Each needs a few hundred megabytes while it runs.
OLLAMA_HOST	http://localhost:11434	Where Ollama is. Give it in full, with http://.
COMMUNITY_WARM_OLLAMA	0 in the desktop app	1 loads the Ollama model when the engine starts instead of at the first conversation.
COMMUNITY_WORKSPACE		A folder to open as the workspace when the engine starts.
COMMUNITY_LAB_DISABLE_UPDATER		1 turns off the AppImage's update check.
PORT, HOST	3040, 127.0.0.1	The engine's port and address, when it runs from source (the desktop app picks a free port from 3040).
COMMUNITY_DATA_DIR	./data	The engine's data folder, when it runs from source.
COMMUNITY_STATIC_DIR		A built client for the engine to serve, when it runs from source.
COMMUNITY_API_PORT, COMMUNITY_UI_PORT	3040, 5195	The development pair's ports (bun run dev).

Two more exist for re-checking the mortality calibration from the command line, and change results: see Calibration and limits.