Configuration

twitch needs almost no configuration: it runs anonymously against public data out of the box. The settings below let you tune politeness, caching, and storage.

Defaults

Setting	Default	Flag
Request pacing	500ms between requests	--rate
Retries	retried on 429/5xx	--retries
Per-request timeout	30s	--timeout
On-disk cache	enabled, fresh for 24h	--cache-ttl, --no-cache, --refresh

Caching

Responses are cached on disk under the data directory. A cached entry is reused until it is older than --cache-ttl (default 24h). To control it:

twitch channel show shroud --cache-ttl 1h    # treat anything older than an hour as stale
twitch channel show shroud --refresh         # fetch fresh and rewrite the cache
twitch channel show shroud --no-cache        # ignore the cache entirely, do not write it

The data directory

Caches and any record store live under one data directory, chosen in this order:

1. --data-dir
2. TWITCH_DATA_DIR
3. $XDG_DATA_HOME/twitch
4. ~/.local/share/twitch

Profiles

--profile <name> keeps a separate set of settings and data under the data directory, so you can switch between, for example, a fast local run and a slow polite one without re-passing flags each time.

Environment variables

Every flag has an environment fallback, prefixed TWITCH_ in upper case with dashes as underscores. For example:

export TWITCH_RATE=1s            # same as --rate 1s
export TWITCH_CACHE_TTL=1h       # same as --cache-ttl 1h
export TWITCH_DATA_DIR=~/data/twitch
export TWITCH_CLIENT_ID=...      # override the public Client-Id

Flags win over environment variables, which win over the built-in defaults.

Sending records to a store

--db tees every emitted record into a store as a side effect of reading, so a session fills a local database without a separate import step:

twitch channel videos shroud --db out.db        # SQLite file
twitch game streams just-chatting --db 'postgres://...'