loki/docs/SESSIONS.md

Sessions

By default, Loki does not send back all previous messages in a conversation to the model. This means that each time you query a model, it's essentially a one-off. However, Loki does support chat-like conversations with LLMs via its sessions mechanism.

Sessions in Loki enable the familiar conversational interactions with LLMs. This means you can reference previous answers and ask follow-up questions and the model will know what you're referring to.

Sessions can be temporary, or can be saved so you can continue conversations at a later time.

Saved sessions are stored in the sessions subdirectory of the Loki configuration directory. The location of the sessions directory varies by system, so you can use the following command to find the sessions directory if you need it:

loki --info | grep 'sessions_dir' | awk '{print $2}'

Usage

When you use a session in Loki, you can either persist it or discard it once you're done. Sessions you discard are then just considered 'temporary' sessions.

Sessions you persist and then load again later will inherit the same configuration as was used during the last usage of that session. That is to say, if you had certain tools or MCP servers enabled when you were last in that session, they will be available again when you continue that session.

Configuration

Session behavior can be configured from the global Loki configuration file. The location of this file varies between systems so you can use the following command to locate it on your system:

loki --info | grep 'config_file' | awk '{print $2}'

The following settings are available to customize the default behavior of sessions globally:

Setting	Description
save_session	Controls the persistence of the session. If true, then any time you're in a session, changes will auto-save unless explicitly defined otherwise. If false, then any time you're in a session, changes will not auto-save unless explicitly specified otherwise. If null, Loki will always prompt the user for what to do.
compression_threshold	Defines the token count threshold at which Loki will compress the session to save on the context length
summarization_prompt	This is the prompt that is used to compress the session up to a given point when compression is triggered
summary_context_prompt	This is the prompt that's used to add the summarized conversation generated by the summarization_prompt as context to the model