Tribal MCP server

Tribal

Semantic compression for project knowledge.

Tribal captures the engineering knowledge that does not get written down in code or tickets. The reasoning behind a load-bearing decision, the heuristic someone keeps reaching for, the breakthrough that closed a gnarly bug. It runs as a Model Context Protocol server, ingests text on demand, and exposes a graph of items connected by what they support, contradict, or refine. Your agent harness talks to it the same way it talks to any other MCP tool.

Tribal is not trying to remember everything. It preserves what remains useful after the work is done.

Quick start

Start with the skills. Tribal runs inside your agent, and the skills teach it to install, verify, wire, and troubleshoot Tribal. Installing them and letting the agent drive is the most reliable path:

npx skills add tribal-memory/skills

Then ask your agent to set Tribal up. The steps below are what the skills walk it through, or what to run by hand. The agent can help either way.

If you plan to use a cloud provider (OpenAI or Anthropic), export its API key in your shell before you launch the agent harness, so the harness and the Tribal binary it spawns inherit it. A key exported into a terminal the harness is already running in is not picked up until you relaunch. Setting it up front removes a lot of the early configuration friction.

Install Tribal using whichever path fits your environment. Pick one:

Homebrew (macOS)

brew install tribal-memory/homebrew-tap/tribal

Shell installer (macOS or Linux)

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf \
  https://github.com/tribal-memory/tribal/releases/latest/download/tribal-installer.sh | sh

Docker Compose (bundled Postgres)

tag=$(curl -fsSL https://api.github.com/repos/tribal-memory/tribal/releases/latest | jq -r .tag_name)
mkdir tribal-docker && cd tribal-docker
curl -fsSL "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tribal-memory/tribal/$tag/docker-compose.yml" -o docker-compose.yml
docker compose up

The compose file pins the image to a specific release, so fetch it from a release tag rather than reusing an old checkout. The stack bundles its own Postgres and bootstraps itself on first start. To point a stage at a cloud provider instead of a local Ollama, configure .env before the first docker compose up; the installing-tribal skill walks through it.

For the Homebrew and shell-installer paths, bootstrap from inside a git repository. This runs setup, registers the repository as a project, mints a bearer token, and prints the MCP config snippet your harness will need:

tribal bootstrap

Prerequisites

• Postgres 14 or higher with the pgvector extension.
• A provider for embeddings and inference. Either a local Ollama installation with the required models, or API keys for a supported cloud provider set in your environment.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.