A self-hosted personal knowledge vault that any LLM can read and write through the Model Context Protocol.
Bartleby keeps your notes as plain Markdown files on a server you control, and exposes them over three surfaces from a single process: a spec-compliant MCP endpoint for LLM clients, a versioned REST API for the browser extension and web UI, and the web UI itself. Your assistant can save what you tell it and recall it later; you can clip a web page from your browser; you can browse and read everything from a small UI — all against the same vault.
The convenient way to give an assistant a memory is to hand your notes to someone else's server. Bartleby takes the other path: you host it, you hold the data. There is no hosted instance, no account, no tenant but you. The server makes no outbound calls — no telemetry, no update checks — and the browser extension talks only to the server you point it at. That single-user, self-hosted posture is the feature, not a limitation: your knowledge vault stays a directory of Markdown files on your own machine that you can read, back up, and move with ordinary tools, whether or not Bartleby is running.
You need Docker and a bearer token of your choosing (any long random string).
git clone https://github.com/t11z/bartleby.git
cd bartleby/infra
cp .env.example .env
# edit .env: set BARTLEBY_AUTH_TOKEN to a long random secret
docker compose up -dThen open http://localhost:8080/ for the web UI, and point your MCP client at
http://localhost:8080/mcp using the same token. Put it behind HTTPS before
exposing it to the internet — see infra/Caddyfile.example
and the installation guide.
One backend process serves all three surfaces and reads/writes a single vault of Markdown files.
flowchart LR
L[LLM client] -->|MCP| S
E[Browser extension] -->|REST + bearer| S
W[Web UI] -->|REST + bearer| S
S[Bartleby server] --> V[(Vault: Markdown + YAML on disk)]
S --- I[(SQLite FTS5 index)]
The full design — data model, API, storage, and roadmap — is in
docs/IMPLEMENTATION_PLAN.md.
The MCP server is spec-compliant and works with any MCP-capable client. It is tested primarily with Claude. If you find an incompatibility with another MCP client, please file an issue.
Full docs — installation, configuration reference, MCP tool reference, and API reference — live at https://t11z.github.io/bartleby/.
- Contributions are welcome — see
CONTRIBUTING.md. - To report a vulnerability, see
SECURITY.md.
MIT © Thomas Sprock.
