Settings & configuration

Excellent is configured in two places: the in-app Settings, and a handful of environment variables for the command line.

In-app settings

Settings live in the app under Settings, grouped by area — your workspace, integrations, and agents. Every agentic feature has its own switch, and each is off until you turn it on:

• Autopilot — Settings → Agents → Autopilot (docs).
• Copilot (in-app chat) — Settings → Agents → Copilot, with a separate switch for develop mode (docs).
• Self-integration, optimization, section audits, usage analytics — each has its own gated settings page.
• Data & residency — Settings → Advanced → Data, where you can see exactly what's stored and export it.

Nothing autonomous runs unless you've explicitly enabled it, and the master switches let you stop everything at once.

Environment variables

When you run headless, a few environment variables control where Excellent looks. All of them are escape hatches — the defaults are detected automatically, so most of the time you set none:

• EXCELLENT_DATA_DIR — the folder holding your database, locks, and logs (default ~/.excellent). Point it elsewhere for a separate or disposable workspace.
• EXCELLENT_HOME — the Excellent source root, when you run the CLI from outside the checkout.
• CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR — a non-default location for your ~/.claude/ config, used when installing the MCP server.
• EXCELLENT_AGENT_ROLE — the identity prefix used when you run from a plain terminal that isn't a recognized agent host.

Where configuration is stored

• Workspace settings live in your database (~/.excellent/data.db), so they travel with your data.
• Command-line agent settings — which CLI to drive, model paths — live in ~/.excellent/agents.json and are edited with excellent-mcp agent config.

Secrets are never stored in plain text: integration tokens and transport keys are handled as described in Security & privacy.