Documents & Ingestion

Documents are Remem’s core unit: encrypted content plus metadata used for retrieval, filtering, and synthesis.

What happens on ingest

When you call POST /v1/documents/ingest, Remem:

Queues an async ingestion job
Encrypts content + metadata with tenant-scoped keys
Classifies content (category/tags/sensitivity/language/summary)
Chunks and embeds searchable text
Indexes vectors + searchable payload metadata

Ingestion is asynchronous. The API returns a job_id immediately; the document appears in search shortly after processing.

Ingestion is namespace-aware. If you send "namespace": "work", Remem writes into that namespace key. If you omit it, Remem uses the API key’s default namespace.

Ingest a document

JSON ingestion

curl -X POST https://api.remem.io/v1/documents/ingest \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "X-API-Key: vlt_..." \
  -d '{
    "title": "Meeting Notes - Q1",
    "content": "We decided to...",
    "source": "api",
    "namespace": "work",
    "source_id": "slack://workspace/channel/message",
    "source_path": "/Users/me/notes/q1.md",
    "metadata": {
      "project": "remem",
      "session_id": "2026-02-14-a",
      "checkpoint_kind": "interval"
    },
    "return_id": true
  }'

Multipart upload

curl -X POST https://api.remem.io/v1/documents/ingest \
  -H "X-API-Key: vlt_..." \
  -F "file=@report.pdf" \
  -F "title=Q1 Report" \
  -F "source=api" \
  -F 'metadata={"department":"engineering"}'

Ingest response

{
  "job_id": "1770218554334-0",
  "message": "Document queued for ingestion",
  "document_id": "3f2f..." 
}

document_id is present when return_id=true; otherwise it may be null.

Request fields

Field	Type	Required	Notes
`content`	string	Yes (JSON mode)	Raw text
`title`	string	No	Optional title
`source`	string	No	`api`, `quick_capture`, `folder_sync`, `gmail`
`namespace`	string	No	Namespace key for this write. Falls back to the API key default namespace.
`source_id`	string	No	Correlation key (not dedupe key)
`source_path`	string	No	Original file path/URI
`mime_type`	string	No	MIME hint
`metadata`	object	No	Encrypted metadata payload
`return_id`	bool	No	Return `document_id` immediately

Source ID + metadata behavior

source_id is stored as correlation metadata.
project, session_id, checkpoint_kind in metadata are normalized for checkpoint filtering.
Tags are normalized/deduped for new ingests.

Retrieve a document

curl -X GET https://api.remem.io/v1/documents/{document_id} \
  -H "X-API-Key: vlt_..."

Returns decrypted content, metadata, status, version, and classification fields.

Retrieve document chunks

curl -X GET "https://api.remem.io/v1/documents/{document_id}/chunks?include_content=true&limit=200" \
  -H "X-API-Key: vlt_..."

Useful for debugging chunk boundaries and vector-linked metadata.

Update a document

curl -X POST https://api.remem.io/v1/documents/{document_id}/update \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "X-API-Key: vlt_..." \
  -d '{
    "content": "Updated text",
    "title": "Updated title"
  }'

Updates create a new version and preserve lifecycle history.

Document versions stay in the original document’s namespace. Namespace selection happens when the document is first ingested.

Delete a document

DELETE /v1/documents/{document_id} performs a soft delete:

Hidden from query results immediately
Cleanup work is queued (vectors/files/cache)
Hard delete is scheduled by lifecycle workers

curl -X DELETE https://api.remem.io/v1/documents/{document_id} \
  -H "X-API-Key: vlt_..."

Chunk backfill / reindex endpoints

These endpoints are for summary-only documents that need real chunk backfill:

POST /v1/documents/backfill-chunks
POST /v1/documents/{document_id}/reindex-chunks

They return job IDs for async processing.

Idempotent ingestion

Use Idempotency-Key to avoid duplicate ingest requests on retries:

curl -X POST https://api.remem.io/v1/documents/ingest \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "X-API-Key: vlt_..." \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: meeting-2026-02-14-001" \
  -d '{"content":"..."}'

Supported file types

Remem supports common text, PDF, image, code, spreadsheet, email, and web formats. Examples:

Text/notes: .txt, .md, .json, .yaml, .xml
PDFs/images: .pdf, .png, .jpg, .webp
Code: .py, .ts, .go, .rs, .java, .cpp
Spreadsheet/email/web: .csv, .tsv, .eml, .msg, .html

Getting Started

Using Remem

Memory Layer

Integrations

Documents & Ingestion

Documents & Ingestion

What happens on ingest

Ingest a document

JSON ingestion

Multipart upload

Ingest response

Request fields

Source ID + metadata behavior

Retrieve a document

Retrieve document chunks

Update a document

Delete a document

Chunk backfill / reindex endpoints

Idempotent ingestion

Supported file types

​Documents & Ingestion

​What happens on ingest

​Ingest a document

​JSON ingestion

​Multipart upload

​Ingest response

​Request fields

​Source ID + metadata behavior

​Retrieve a document

​Retrieve document chunks

​Update a document

​Delete a document

​Chunk backfill / reindex endpoints

​Idempotent ingestion

​Supported file types

Documents & Ingestion

What happens on ingest

Ingest a document

JSON ingestion

Multipart upload

Ingest response

Request fields

Source ID + metadata behavior

Retrieve a document

Retrieve document chunks

Update a document

Delete a document

Chunk backfill / reindex endpoints

Idempotent ingestion

Supported file types