Environment variables

All are optional. Without them forest writes no logs.

Output

Variable	Effect
FOREST_OUTPUT	rich, plain or auto (the default, same as unset). --color/--no-color take precedence.
NO_COLOR	Any value gives plain output, unless FOREST_OUTPUT or a flag says otherwise.
FORCE_COLOR	Any value gives rich output, unless FOREST_OUTPUT, NO_COLOR or a flag says otherwise.

Logging

Variable	Default	Effect
FOREST_LOG_FILE	unset	Append logs to this file.
FOREST_LOG_FORMAT	json	json or text. Set without FOREST_LOG_FILE to log to stderr.
FOREST_LOG_LEVEL	INFO	Standard level name. With logging on and this unset, --verbose gives DEBUG.

Forest scrubs keys and tokens from log messages and from logged fields, including the command line. The scrub matches common secret shapes only, so keep secrets out of command arguments.

FOREST_LOG_FILE=forest.log forest push

Transfer retries

Forest retries rclone failures that look temporary, such as timeouts and dropped connections.

Variable	Default	Effect
FOREST_TRANSFER_RETRIES	2	Extra attempts. 0 disables retries.
FOREST_RETRY_BASE_DELAY	0.5	First wait in seconds. It doubles on each retry.

rclone

Forest runs rclone with --inplace=false, so an inherited RCLONE_INPLACE has no effect. Other RCLONE_* variables reach rclone unchanged.