Moving to passageway

trilium-recall's engine has grown into passageway: the same retrieval (keywords plus a multilingual embedding model, a relevance gate, up to three passages or nothing), made source-agnostic, with Trilium as one connector among others, a choice of embedding models, a public evaluation harness and a published measurement. On this repository's own public fixture the passageway Trilium connector scores hit@3 0.92 and silence 1.0 against trilium-recall's 0.83 and 1.0 (the connector).

trilium-recall is superseded by passageway and no longer developed: no fixes, no new versions. A running trilium-recall keeps working as it is, but there is nothing that moves it over for you; this page says what changes, so the move is a new passageway next to Trilium, configured once.

What stays the same

• The recall MCP tool, its instructions on connect, the up-to-three-passages answer and the silence when nothing fits.
• The prompt hook for Claude Code: the passageway plugin brings its own, connected with /passageway-connect.
• Read-only access through ETAPI, the index that can always be deleted and rebuilt, the areas of an LLM wiki (#llmWikiPart, #calendarRoot), the wiki labels and relations.

What changes

trilium-recall	passageway
Image ghcr.io/marceltov/trilium-recall	Image ghcr.io/marceltov/passageway (Run it)
RECALL_LOGIN_PASSWORD, RECALL_BASE_URL, RECALL_PORT, RECALL_POLL_SECONDS, RECALL_RECONCILE_SECONDS, RECALL_INSTRUCTIONS, RECALL_TOOL_DESCRIPTION	The same names with PASSAGEWAY_ instead of RECALL_
RECALL_INSTANCES=main, TRILIUM_MAIN_URL, TRILIUM_MAIN_TOKEN	One [[connector]] per instance in passageway.toml (below); the token stays an environment variable, referenced as env:NAME
recall(query, instance=...)	recall(query, source=...): an instance is a source, named after its connector
RECALL_MODEL_DIR	PASSAGEWAY_MODEL_DIR; the model is fetched on first start, pinned and checksummed, or baked into the image
The trilium-recall plugin and /trilium-recall-setup	The passageway plugin (/plugin marketplace add Marceltov/passageway) and /passageway-connect (and /passageway-add-source writes the connector)
A summary shown in place of its source when it matched almost as well	Not carried over: a summary and its source link each other, and a hit shows the other as a related item (ADR 0004)

The configuration

# /config/passageway.toml in the container, ~/.config/passageway/passageway.toml on a machine
[[connector]]
name = "main"                                   # the source name recall shows; was RECALL_INSTANCES
command = ["python", "-m", "passageway_connector_trilium"]
env = { URL = "http://trilium:8080", WEB_URL = "https://notes.example.org" }
secrets = { TOKEN = "env:TRILIUM_MAIN_TOKEN" }  # the same variable as before

services:
  passageway:
    image: ghcr.io/marceltov/passageway:latest
    ports: ["9093:8082"]
    volumes:
      - passageway-data:/data
      - ./passageway.toml:/config/passageway.toml:ro
    environment:
      PASSAGEWAY_LOGIN_PASSWORD: ${RECALL_LOGIN_PASSWORD}   # the same secret keeps working for the hook and the tool
      PASSAGEWAY_BASE_URL: https://recall.example
      TRILIUM_MAIN_TOKEN: ${RECALL_ETAPI_TOKEN}
volumes:
  passageway-data:

The index is rebuilt from Trilium on the first start (about half a minute for a few hundred notes), so nothing is copied over. Keep the old container until the new one's /health says ok, then point the MCP client and the hook at the new URL (the same URL, if the port is reused).

Measured, not promised

The parity above is on the public fixture in this repository (eval/fixture-cases.yaml), reproduced in passageway with the real model against an in-test ETAPI. The private question set behind the numbers on Measurements has not been run against passageway yet.