Context Compilation Overview

ov compile reads documents, notes, web pages, or session records from OpenViking and uses a Skill to organize them into a Wiki, knowledge graph, daily report, or other output stored in OpenViking.

How it works

Compilation with an installed Skill needs:

• --from: one or more source directories or files.
• --to: the output directory.
• --skill: the URI of an installed Skill that defines the output's content and structure.

Use the optional --instruction to specify this run's scope, audience, language, emphasis, or date range.

The configured Agent Runtime runs the compilation; local deployments can use the built-in VikingBot. It reads the sources and Skill under the requesting user's identity, then organizes and writes content in a dedicated agent loop. The task runs asynchronously and returns a task_id for checking progress and results.

Run it in one command

First import the sources and install the Skill using the LLM Wiki example, then run:

ov compile \
  --from viking://resources/research \
  --to viking://resources/research-wiki \
  --skill viking://agent/skills/llm-wiki \
  --instruction "Organize the research into a knowledge base the team can search"

The command returns a cmp_... task ID immediately. Use ov task status <id> to check progress and ov task cancel <id> to stop it. The full field reference, task lifecycle, and HTTP API are in the Agent Runtime API.

Use Web Studio

Studio provides a Compile list at /compile, a form at /compile/new, and task details at /compile/tasks/<task_id>. Select and preview a Skill, browse source directories, submit multiple sources, inspect or cancel a task, and open its output directory. The Filesystem terminal also supports compile and task; it can hand parameters to the form.

Task-list cursors are signed with a process-local key and bound to the caller and filters. Restarting the service invalidates old cursors; refresh the list to start again. A cursor from one replica is not portable to another. Pagination scans stored task records rather than using an index, so read cost grows with retained history.

For HTTP submission retries, reuse the same Idempotency-Key and request parameters; a changed request with the same key returns 409. Recovery lasts only as long as the task record: completed/cancelled records expire 24 hours after their last update, failed records after 7 days. This is not permanent submission history or a cross-instance exactly-once guarantee. See Agent Runtime for submission recovery and Tasks for task operations.

Swap the Skill, get a different output

The Skill defines the output. The repository includes these examples; LLM Wiki and Knowledge Graph also include visualization scripts:

Skill	Output shape	Good for	Example
LLM Wiki	A set of interlinked Markdown pages (entity, concept, method…) plus a navigation index.md	A knowledge base that both people and agents can quickly search, navigate, and reuse	LLM Wiki example
Knowledge Graph	entities/*.md nodes plus a relations.jsonl edge file	Structured knowledge you traverse by entity, type, and relationship	Knowledge Graph example
Daily Report	One <YYYY-MM-DD>.md page per date	Reconstructing "what actually happened each day" from conversations, sessions, messages, and task records	Daily Report example
Knowledge Distillation	Topic-organized high-level conclusion pages	Distilling cross-source findings, trends, and changes out of one or more knowledge bases	Knowledge Distillation example

The first two examples also give the complete ov commands from importing sources → adding the Skill → running compile → visualizing the output, ending in an interactive HTML graph.

Not only new artifacts: consolidating existing memories

Besides compiling source material into new knowledge artifacts with a Skill, ov compile has a special mode — set --skill to memory to consolidate an existing memory directory in place (dedup, merge, split, compact), without going through VikingBot. See Memory Consolidation.

Prerequisites

• For the Skill-based examples, a running OpenViking service with a Compile Runtime configured. For local use, install the openviking[bot] dependencies and enable the built-in VikingBot with --with-bot. The --skill memory mode runs in-process without a Compile Runtime and takes no --from. The default endpoint is http://localhost:1933; remote use needs an API Key — see Authentication. No service yet? Start with the Quick Start.
• The ov CLI configured with a connection (~/.openviking/ovcli.conf, or a file selected by OPENVIKING_CLI_CONFIG_FILE).
• Paths beginning with examples/... are relative to the repository. Download the OpenViking repository and run the commands from its root.
• Python 3 for the visualization scripts. The LLM Wiki script also requires the openviking Python package.

Related docs

• VikingBot concepts — the built-in Compile runtime
• Agent Runtime API — full reference for creating, inspecting, and cancelling Compile tasks
• Skills API — managing and customizing Skills