Outline MCP server

outline-mcp

Tree-structured knowledge base as an MCP server.

LLM sessions are ephemeral. outline-mcp gives them a persistent, editable knowledge tree — sections and content nodes that can be browsed (toc), annotated with properties, and evolved across sessions. Nodes with inject=true are automatically included in session context.

Quick Start

cargo install --path .

Claude Code (~/.claude.json)

Native binary (after cargo install)

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "outline": {
      "command": "outline-mcp",
      "args": ["/path/to/your-book.json"]
    }
  }
}

Docker (no Rust toolchain required)

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "outline": {
      "command": "docker",
      "args": [
        "run", "-i", "--rm",
        "-v", "/path/to/data:/data",
        "ghcr.io/ynishi/outline-mcp:latest",
        "/data/your-book.json"
      ]
    }
  }
}

If the path argument is omitted, defaults to outline-book.json in the current directory.

Multi-device (one shelf, many devices)

--mcp-http serves the same tools over MCP's streamable HTTP transport, so several devices can share one shelf. A single process owns the directory — book JSON plus the per-slug .events.db — which keeps the single-writer storage model intact, so there is no sync or conflict resolution to configure.

outline-mcp /path/to/books --mcp-http                          # 127.0.0.1:8486
outline-mcp /path/to/books --mcp-http --bind 127.0.0.1:9000

Point clients at /mcp on that address:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "outline": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "http://127.0.0.1:8486/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Binding beyond loopback requires a token. Startup is refused without one, before any listener is opened:

OUTLINE_MCP_HTTP_TOKEN=<token> outline-mcp /path/to/books --mcp-http --bind 0.0.0.0:8486

Every request must then carry Authorization: Bearer — set it wherever your MCP client configures request headers. TLS termination is a reverse-proxy concern. Logs go to stderr in both transports; stdout stays reserved for the stdio protocol channel.

Service templates for running this as a daemon live in contrib/systemd/ and contrib/launchd/. docs/runbooks/ covers moving an existing shelf to a central host (data-migration.md) and verifying a deployment end to end (multi-device-smoke.md).

Workflow

shelf  →  select_book  →  toc  →  node_create / node_update / node_move
                                   node_batch_move / node_batch_update / node_query
                                   checklist / import / init / gen_routing
                                   snapshot_create / snapshot_list / snapshot_restore
                                   node_history / dump

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.