HTS Server

Use this when you need a running hts process — the run/config surface only. For the full HTS_* environment reference, API endpoints, bulk import CLI, and bootstrap-sync internals, see work-with-hts.

Running

# Default: SQLite, port 8090, no seed data
cargo run --bin hts

# Custom database path and port
HTS_DATABASE_URL=./my-terminology.db HTS_SERVER_PORT=9090 cargo run --bin hts

# Windows equivalent
$env:HTS_DATABASE_URL = ".\my-terminology.db"
$env:HTS_SERVER_PORT  = "9090"
cargo run --bin hts

Seeding terminology data

An empty HTS has no CodeSystems or ValueSets to look up. The repo ships a bundled, public-domain/permissively-licensed terminology set at crates/hts/terminology-data/ — the same files baked into every HTS release archive and Docker image. Point HTS_BOOTSTRAP_DIR at it to auto-import them on startup:

HTS_BOOTSTRAP_DIR=./crates/hts/terminology-data cargo run --bin hts

$env:HTS_BOOTSTRAP_DIR = ".\crates\hts\terminology-data"
cargo run --bin hts

Admin UI

The HTS administrative UI (crates/hts-ui) is mounted on hts itself at /ui/hts — it is on by default, matching HFS's always-on UI. Operators who deploy behind an API gateway and don't want an HTML surface listening at all can opt out with HTS_UI_ENABLED=false:

HTS_BOOTSTRAP_DIR=./crates/hts/terminology-data cargo run --bin hts

$env:HTS_BOOTSTRAP_DIR = ".\crates\hts\terminology-data"
cargo run --bin hts

http://localhost:8090/ui/hts serves the dashboard; the bare root / redirects there too.

This gives you ICD-10-CM, ICD-9-CM, NCI Thesaurus, MeSH (via NCI Thesaurus FLAT), NDC, HL7 THO, HL7 v2 tables, UCUM, and NUCC out of the box. Each file is hashed (SHA-256) into a bootstrap_imports ledger, so it's safe to leave HTS_BOOTSTRAP_DIR set permanently in a dev .env — unchanged files are skipped on every restart, only new or changed files re-import.

Not included: SNOMED CT, LOINC, RxNorm, CPT, and MedDRA require a separate license/registration and must be imported manually via hts import <path> --format ... (see work-with-hts).

The bundled files are machine-managed — don't hand-edit them. Refresh the pinned versions with crates/hts/scripts/download-bundled-terminologies.ps1 (or the .sh equivalent); see crates/hts/terminology-data/README.md and RELEASING.md for the full refresh workflow.

Environment (running)

Variable	Default	Description
HTS_SERVER_PORT	8090	Server port
HTS_SERVER_HOST	127.0.0.1	Host to bind
HTS_DATABASE_URL	./data/hts.db	SQLite file path or PostgreSQL connection URL
HTS_BOOTSTRAP_DIR	none	Directory of terminology files imported on startup — set to ./crates/hts/terminology-data for the bundled seed set
HTS_LOG_LEVEL	info	Log level: error, warn, info, debug, trace

See work-with-hts for storage backend selection, CORS/body-size limits, the full API surface, and the bulk import CLI.

Sanity check

curl http://localhost:8090/health
curl "http://localhost:8090/metadata?mode=terminology"

The second call should return a TerminologyCapabilities resource once seeded.