LibreChatTemporary Chat
Temporary chats keep selected conversations out of your chat history, search results, and bookmarks for a private, focused experience.
Temporary chats let you ask something without keeping it. Use them for sensitive topics, quick experiments, or anything you don't need to save. A temporary chat stays out of your history sidebar, never appears in search, can't be bookmarked, and is deleted automatically once its retention period ends (30 days by default).
Start a Temporary Chat
Open the model menu. Select the model dropdown at the top left of the chat view.
Turn on Temporary Chat. Toggle the Temporary Chat switch to the ON position.
Confirm it's active. A banner appears above the message box while Temporary Chat is on. Select the close (x) on the banner to turn it off and return to a normal conversation.
What a Temporary Chat Does
- Does not appear in the chat history sidebar.
- Is excluded from search results.
- Cannot be bookmarked.
- Is stored in the database until its retention period ends, then deleted automatically.
Retention period
The default retention period is 30 days. Administrators can change it. See Configuration below.
Configuration (administrators)
Temporary Chat is available to users by default. Administrators control whether the feature is offered and how long temporary chats are kept.
Availability is governed by the TEMPORARY_CHAT role permission. Manage it for each role from the Admin Panel. The interface.temporaryChat option in librechat.yaml only seeds this permission for the default USER role at startup and is deprecated for permission management.
Retention is set with interface.temporaryChatRetention (in hours). The minimum is 1 hour, the maximum is 8760 (1 year), and the default is 720 (30 days).
interface:
temporaryChat: true
temporaryChatRetention: 168 # retain temporary chats for 7 days# Hours to retain temporary chats (default: 720 = 30 days)
TEMP_CHAT_RETENTION_HOURS=168Deprecated
TEMP_CHAT_RETENTION_HOURS is deprecated. Prefer interface.temporaryChatRetention in librechat.yaml, which takes precedence over the environment variable.
Common retention values:
| Value | Period |
|---|---|
1 | 1 hour (minimum) |
24 | 1 day |
168 | 1 week |
720 | 30 days (default) |
8760 | 1 year (maximum) |
For the full set of options, including retentionMode and retainAgentFiles, see the interface reference.
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