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Orator Docs

Quickstart

This guide walks you through indexing your first repository and querying context in under 5 minutes.

1. Log in

Authenticate with your Orator account:

Terminal window
orator login

This opens your browser to complete authentication. On success, you’ll see:

✓ Logged in as [email protected]
  API key stored in ~/.config/orator/config.json

2. Initialize your repository

Navigate to your project directory and initialize Orator:

Terminal window
cd /path/to/your/project
orator init

Orator detects your repository and registers it:

✓ Detected git repository: my-project
  Remote: https://github.com/you/my-project.git
  Branch: main


✓ Repository registered
  Repo ID: 01JQKX8F7Y2M3N4P5R6S7T8V9W

3. Index your codebase

Trigger the indexing process:

Terminal window
orator index

Orator uploads your code metadata and starts building the knowledge graph:

✓ Indexing started
  Job ID: 01JQKX9A1B2C3D4E5F6G7H8J9K
  Files detected: 247


  ◐ Processing... 247/247 files
  ◐ Building knowledge graph...
  ◐ Detecting patterns...


✓ Indexing complete
  Nodes: 1,842 (functions, classes, modules, types)
  Edges: 3,267 (imports, calls, extends, implements)
  Patterns: 14 detected
  Duration: 23s

4. Query your codebase

Now you can ask questions about your code:

Terminal window
orator query "how does authentication work?"

Orator returns structured context:

Query: "how does authentication work?"
Tokens: 2,847


─── Context ────────────────────────────────────────


[code] src/middleware/auth.ts (relevance: 0.95)
  Authentication middleware — validates JWT tokens,
  extracts user from session, attaches to request context.


[code] src/services/auth-service.ts (relevance: 0.91)
  AuthService class — handles login, signup, token
  refresh, password reset flows.


[pattern] error_handling (relevance: 0.82)
  Auth errors use AppError class with specific codes:
  UNAUTHORIZED, TOKEN_EXPIRED, INVALID_CREDENTIALS.


[convention] naming (relevance: 0.78)
  Auth-related files prefixed with "auth-" in services/
  and middleware/ directories.

5. Check status

View the current state of your indexed repository:

Terminal window
orator status
Repository: my-project
Status: indexed
Last indexed: 2 minutes ago
Nodes: 1,842
Patterns: 14
Context rules: 0

Next Steps

  • Learn about Core Concepts to understand how Orator works under the hood
  • Set up the MCP Server so Claude can query your codebase directly
  • Define Context Rules to customize what context gets served
  • Explore the full CLI reference for all available commands