Configuration

yelp needs almost no configuration: it runs anonymously against public data out of the box. The one credential it reads is the optional YELP_API_KEY, which turns on the Fusion API plane. The settings below let you tune the plane, politeness, and storage.

The Fusion API key

YELP_API_KEY holds a free Yelp developer key. When it is set, yelp uses the Fusion API plane, which answers from any network; without it, yelp uses the web plane, which is best-effort behind Yelp's bot wall. The key is read from the environment only, never a flag, so it never lands in shell history or a process list.

export YELP_API_KEY=...     # turns on the fusion plane
yelp biz garaje-san-francisco --plane web   # force the web plane for one run

--plane auto (the default) picks fusion when the key is set and web otherwise. --plane fusion without a key, or categories on the web plane, exits 4.

Defaults

Setting	Default	Flag
Requests	paced and retried on 429/5xx	--rate, --retries
Per-request timeout	30s	--timeout
On-disk cache	under the data directory	--no-cache to bypass

The data directory

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

1. --data-dir
2. YELP_DATA_DIR
3. $XDG_DATA_HOME/yelp
4. ~/.local/share/yelp

Environment variables

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

export YELP_RATE=1s        # same as --rate 1s
export YELP_DATA_DIR=~/data/yelp

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:

yelp reviews garaje-san-francisco --db out.db        # SQLite file
yelp search "tacos" "San Francisco, CA" --db 'postgres://...'