briar MCP server

briar

briar is a command-line tool that runs on your own machine. It does two things:

Jira or Linear, AWS, Fireflies) and saves it as markdown "knowledge".

1. It reads what is going on in your team's tools (GitHub or Bitbucket,

ticket and opens a draft PR. Another fixes the review comments on a PR.

1. It runs AI coding agents that use that knowledge. One agent takes a

There is no briar server and no account. briar talks only to the services you set up: your code host, your tracker, your cloud, and your LLM provider. Your credentials stay in a file on your machine.

Install

pip install briar-cli
briar version

You get briar-cli 1.1.75 (or newer). briar needs Python 3.10 or later.

The base install covers GitHub, Bitbucket, AWS, Jira, Linear, Fireflies, Anthropic (Claude) and AWS Bedrock, with a file or Postgres store. It also runs the coding agents. Extras add more:

pip install 'briar-cli[mcp]'      # briar mcp serve, briar chat, MCP tools for agents
pip install 'briar-cli[all]'      # everything below

The extras are [openai], [gemini], [mcp], [gcp], [azure] and [vault].

To run briar agent or briar plan run you also need git and the GitHub CLI gh, because the agent runs them.

The [mcp] extra adds three things:

such a runbook stops without the extra.

• briar mcp serve and briar chat. They do not start without it.
• The tool servers listed under mcp: in a runbook. An agent run with

extra, briar skips them, logs one warning and goes on.

• Two small helper tools for agents, "think" and "time". Without the

Since 1.1.74 a plain install runs agents. Older versions stopped with MCP support requires the mcp package unless you passed --no-default-mcp.

Quickstart

# 1. Save a GitHub token and Jira login. They go to ~/.config/briar/secrets.env
briar auth login github-pat --company acme
briar auth login jira-token --company acme

# 2. Give briar a Claude key. It reads it from your shell.
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-your-key

# 3. Read the repo's recent PRs and its tools into the blob knowledge:acme
briar extract --company acme --repo acme-co/acme-app \
    --include pr-archaeology --include codebase-conventions --max 50

# 4. Read what was saved
briar context get knowledge:acme

# 5. Print the agent's prompt for ticket ACME-42. No cost, nothing pushed.
briar agent implement --company acme --repo acme-co/acme-app \
    --ticket-key ACME-42 --tracker jira --dry-run

# 6. Run it for real: clone, branch, code, test, open a draft PR
briar agent implement --company acme --repo acme-co/acme-app \
    --ticket-key ACME-42 --tracker jira

After step 3 you have ./knowledge/knowledge/acme.md. After step 6 you have a branch chore/acme-42 and a draft PR on acme-co/acme-app.

Less typing with .briar.toml

Every setting is looked up in this order: the flag you type, then an environment variable, then .briar.toml, then the built-in default. The repo owner and name can also come from the git origin remote.

Write a starter file in your repo:

briar init --company acme

You get a .briar.toml with the company, the store, and the repo taken from git. The [agent] part comes commented out. Uncomment it to set agent defaults:

company = "acme"
store   = "file"

[repo]
owner    = "acme-co"
repo     = "acme-app"
provider = "github"

[agent]
model          = "claude-sonnet-4-6"
git_user_name  = "Acme Bot"
git_user_email = "bot@acme.com"

Inside that repo the commands get short:

briar extract --include pr-archaeology
briar agent implement --ticket-key ACME-42

briar config show prints each setting and where it came from. briar doctor checks the config, git, credentials and store. eval "$(briar completion bash)" turns on tab completion (zsh works too). See setup.md.

Run with Docker

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.