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Tribal

Tribal

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tribal.buildMemory & Knowledge10Updated 37w ago
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About Tribal

Tribal is a personal knowledge context engine for software development, built for coding agents that need to retrieve insights from development work. It captures debugging lessons, heuristics, and decision rationale and makes them available through MCP.

Key features

  1. 01Capture development learnings and debugging insights
  2. 02Store heuristics and decision rationale
  3. 03Retrieve knowledge through coding agents
  4. 04Run as an MCP server over stdio

Use cases

  1. 01Recall the rationale behind an engineering decision
  2. 02Find prior debugging insights during a new issue
  3. 03Retrieve useful development heuristics

MCP support

Makes captured development knowledge retrievable by coding agents through an MCP server using stdio transport.

#rust#postgres#ai#memory#mcp#embeddings#knowledge-graph#developer-tools#semantic-search#knowledge-management#vector-search#semantic-memory#llm#pgvector#tacit-knowledge#model-context-protocol#mcp-server#claude-code#opencode

Configuration

Local server config is the same for every client. Copy it into your client’s MCP config file.

mcp.json · Universal config
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "tribal": {
      "command": "docker",
      "args": [
        "run",
        "-i",
        "--rm",
        "-e",
        "TRIBAL_DATABASE__URL",
        "-e",
        "TRIBAL_PROJECT_REMOTE",
        "-e",
        "TRIBAL_PROJECT_NAME",
        "-e",
        "TRIBAL_SERVER__TRANSPORT",
        "-e",
        "TRIBAL_SERVER__BIND_ADDRESS",
        "-e",
        "TRIBAL_PUBLIC_MCP_URL",
        "-e",
        "OPENAI_API_KEY",
        "-e",
        "ANTHROPIC_API_KEY",
        "ghcr.io/tribal-memory/tribal:0.4.1"
      ],
      "env": {
        "TRIBAL_DATABASE__URL": "<TRIBAL_DATABASE__URL>",
        "TRIBAL_PROJECT_REMOTE": "<TRIBAL_PROJECT_REMOTE>",
        "TRIBAL_PROJECT_NAME": "<TRIBAL_PROJECT_NAME>",
        "TRIBAL_SERVER__TRANSPORT": "<TRIBAL_SERVER__TRANSPORT>",
        "TRIBAL_SERVER__BIND_ADDRESS": "<TRIBAL_SERVER__BIND_ADDRESS>",
        "TRIBAL_PUBLIC_MCP_URL": "<TRIBAL_PUBLIC_MCP_URL>",
        "OPENAI_API_KEY": "<OPENAI_API_KEY>",
        "ANTHROPIC_API_KEY": "<ANTHROPIC_API_KEY>"
      }
    }
  }
}
Run commanddocker run -i --rm -e TRIBAL_DATABASE__URL -e TRIBAL_PROJECT_REMOTE -e TRIBAL_PROJECT_NAME -e TRIBAL_SERVER__TRANSPORT -e TRIBAL_SERVER__BIND_ADDRESS -e TRIBAL_PUBLIC_MCP_URL -e OPENAI_API_KEY -e ANTHROPIC_API_KEY ghcr.io/tribal-memory/tribal:0.4.1
Environment variables to set
TRIBAL_DATABASE__URLPostgres (pgvector) connection string. Tribal is self-hosted; you provide the database. The supported, complete deployment is docker-compose.yml.
TRIBAL_PROJECT_REMOTEFirst-run only: the git remote that identifies the project bootstrapped on first start.
TRIBAL_PROJECT_NAMEFirst-run only: the name of the project bootstrapped on first start.
TRIBAL_SERVER__TRANSPORTContainerised transport: http or sse. The Docker image does not serve stdio; install the binary for stdio.
TRIBAL_SERVER__BIND_ADDRESSAddress the server binds inside the container. Must be 0.0.0.0 (not the loopback default) for the published port to be reachable.
TRIBAL_PUBLIC_MCP_URLThe URL clients use to reach the server (for example http://127.0.0.1:8725/mcp). Needed for OAuth dynamic client registration once the server binds a routable interface.
OPENAI_API_KEYSecretOptional; only if an ingest or retrieval stage is configured to use OpenAI (defaults target a local Ollama).
ANTHROPIC_API_KEYSecretOptional; only if a stage is configured to use Anthropic.

Local servers need a runtime on your machine (e.g. Node.js 18+). Config file locations differ by client; see your client’s docs.

Packages
ocighcr.io/tribal-memory/tribal:0.4.1

Tools

No tool list yet

Local servers expose tools only once running on your machine, and the maintainer has not provided a tool list.

Details

From the project README

Tribal

A personal knowledge context engine for software development. Tribal captures learnings, debugging insights, heuristics, and decision rationale from development work, then makes that knowledge retrievable by coding agents via MCP (Model Context Protocol).

Prerequisites

  • Rust (stable toolchain, 1.89+)
  • Rust nightly (for rustfmt — rustup toolchain install nightly)
  • Docker (for local Postgres and test containers)
  • just — cargo install just
  • sqlx-cli — cargo install sqlx-cli --no-default-features --features postgres
  • cargo-deny — cargo install cargo-deny

Setup

git clone [email protected]:samfolo/tribal.git
cd tribal
just db-up
just db-migrate
just check
just test

Running

# Run the MCP server (stdio transport)
just serve

# Run with a specific project
just serve-project <project_id>

Development

# Format code (requires nightly rustfmt)
just fmt

# Lint and format check
just check

# Run all tests
just test

# Run unit tests only (no database required)
just test-unit

# Full pre-push check (format, lint, test)
just pre-push

# Regenerate sqlx offline query metadata
just sqlx-prepare

Licence

MIT

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