Configuration

walmart needs almost no configuration: the core surfaces run anonymously against public data out of the box. The settings below let you tune politeness, opt in to the Affiliate API, and choose where data lands.

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

Opting in to the Affiliate API

The product, search, category, and store surfaces are walled from datacenter IPs, and the store locator has no anonymous endpoint at all. When you set a consumer id and a private key, the walled commands fall back to Walmart's documented Affiliate API, and store find and trending use it directly:

export WALMART_CONSUMER_ID=...               # the consumer id
export WALMART_PRIVATE_KEY_FILE=~/wm_key.pem # path to the RSA private key (PEM)
# or paste the key itself instead of pointing at a file:
export WALMART_PRIVATE_KEY="$(cat ~/wm_key.pem)"
export WALMART_KEY_VERSION=1                  # the key version (default 1)

The credentials come from a free Walmart developer account. Unlike an OAuth backend there is no token to exchange: walmart signs each request in place with the RSA key, computing the signature from the consumer id, a millisecond timestamp, and the key version. It reads the credentials from the environment rather than flags so they never land in your shell history. The reliable core surfaces (suggest, category tree) never touch the API.

WALMART_PUBLISHER_ID and WALMART_ZIP are optional and forwarded when present; WALMART_ZIP also sets the ZIP context for the store and price reads, the same as --zip.

The data directory

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

1. --data-dir
2. WALMART_DATA_DIR
3. $XDG_DATA_HOME/walmart
4. ~/.local/share/walmart

Environment variables

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

export WALMART_RATE=1s        # same as --rate 1s
export WALMART_DATA_DIR=~/data/walmart

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:

walmart category browse 3944 --db out.db        # SQLite file
walmart category browse 3944 --db 'postgres://...'