DocsAgent MCP — Zotero, Obsidian & Apple Notes for AI agents 📚⚡

DocsAgent gives AI agents instant, private access to your personal knowledge base. docsagent is the spec-driven MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that lets any AI agent — Claude Desktop, Cursor, Cline, Qwen Code, or any MCP client — search, read, and write your Zotero library, Obsidian vault, and Apple Notes (macOS) through a resident C++ search engine. BM25 full-text search + query-ranked passage retrieval over 1,000+ PDFs at ~15 ms, fully local (RAG-ready knowledge base).

• 🔒 Local-first & private — the engine reads your Zotero library, Obsidian vault, and Apple Notes store directly on your machine. Your notes and PDFs never leave it.
• 🗂 Three sources, one query — Zotero items/annotations/notes, Obsidian vaults, and Apple Notes (macOS only); mixed search fuses all three by reciprocal rank.
• ⚡ Native C++ search core — inverted-index BM25 + passage ranking, millisecond lookup, low memory footprint (160–227 MB for a 1,500-paper library).
• 🧩 8 MCP tools — 5 read + 3 write, with JSON-schema validated arguments, token budgets, result dedup, and a three-layer write safety gate.
• 🌐 Two transports — stdio for local MCP clients, Streamable HTTP for remote deployment (origin checks, API-key / OAuth 2.0 token introspection, per-request RBAC, /health probe).
• 🐍 Two shells, one core — this TypeScript package and a feature-equal Python wrapper ship the same tools over the same JSON-RPC contract.

Architecture

MCP Client (Claude Desktop / Cursor / Cline / Qwen Code / any MCP host)
        │  stdio (local)   or   Streamable HTTP  /mcp  (remote)
        ▼
MCP shell  ← this package (@docsagent/mcp-zotero / docsagent-mcp-zotero)
   · tool schemas (spec-driven), argument validation, token budget, dedup
   · write orchestration via the Zotero local API, write safety gate, RBAC
   · group-library sync via the Zotero Web API
        │  JSON-RPC 2.0 over HTTP ({coreHost}:{httpPort}/rpc, cpp-httplib)
        ▼
DocsAgent Core (resident C++ engine)
   · reads ~/Zotero/zotero.sqlite + storage/, an Obsidian vault, and (macOS) the
     Apple Notes store — directly on your machine
   · builds & serves one index per source (BM25 + passage ranking); mixed search
     (source "all") fuses them by reciprocal rank (RRF, k=60)

The shell never spawns the core during tool calls and never touches your source files. The core runs as a background service and stays available across MCP client restarts. Tool schemas and error codes: spec/.

Quick Start

1. Start the core

npx @docsagent/docsagent start           # spawn the bundled core for your platform
npx @docsagent/docsagent status          # pid / endpoint / version

Python shell (same verbs, under the core subcommand):

pip install ./python                      # build the wheel locally (PyPI upload pending)
docsagent-mcp core start

(core stop / core restart also available. The core indexes every configured source — your Zotero data directory, your Obsidian vault, and (macOS) Apple Notes — and serves JSON-RPC on http://0.0.0.0:23120/rpc.)

2. Configure your MCP client

Claude Desktop / Cursor / Cline / Qwen Code (mcpServers):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "docsagent": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@docsagent/docsagent"]
    }
  }
}