Tribal

io.github.tribal-memoryPublished by GitHub account tribal-memoryv0.4.1Updated Oct 24, 2026

Self-hosted semantic memory over MCP for an engineering team's tacit knowledge. Needs Postgres.

VerifiedSTDIODesktop onlyKnowledge & Memory Developer Tools

Server details

Identifier: io.github.tribal-memory/tribal
Transport: STDIO
Runtime: Desktop only
Trust: Verified
Published: Sep 16, 2026

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Overview

AI-generated overview

Self-hosted semantic memory MCP server that captures an engineering team's tacit project knowledge and exposes it as a queryable graph.

What you can do: Tribal ingests text on demand and stores engineering knowledge that never made it into code or tickets, such as the reasoning behind a decision or a hard-won debugging insight. It exposes a graph of items connected by what they support, contradict, or refine, and lets the assistant ingest knowledge, query it, traverse the graph, and rate retrieval quality. It runs as an MCP server that the agent harness talks to like any other MCP tool.
When to use it: Worth adding when a team wants durable, self-hosted memory of project context that an assistant can recall across sessions, rather than a general-purpose note store. It suits engineering workflows where prior decisions and heuristics matter later.
Requirements: A local process, desktop only. Needs Postgres 14 or higher with the pgvector extension, plus an embeddings and inference provider: a local Ollama installation or a cloud provider key. Required environment variables include TRIBAL_DATABASE__URL, TRIBAL_PROJECT_NAME, and TRIBAL_PROJECT_REMOTE. Optional secrets are ANTHROPIC_API_KEY and OPENAI_API_KEY. Docker Compose is the supported complete deployment.

Before you install

It is self-hosted, so you supply and maintain the Postgres database. Optional secrets ANTHROPIC_API_KEY and OPENAI_API_KEY are read from the environment and sent to those providers when a stage is configured to use them. The server can write ingested knowledge into your database, and the Docker path binds a network interface, so review the bind address and authentication settings before exposing it.

Installation

In SourceWeft

Open Tribal in the dashboard and add it to a workspace.
Enable the server for the chats that should use its tools.

Desktop only via STDIO. STDIO servers start a local process, so they need the SourceWeft desktop host.

Other MCP clients

Follow the launch instructions in the repository.

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

bash

git clone [email protected]:samfolo/tribal.gitcd tribaljust db-upjust db-migratejust checkjust test

git clone [email protected]:samfolo/tribal.gitcd tribaljust db-upjust db-migratejust checkjust test

Running

bash

# Run the MCP server (stdio transport)just serve
# Run with a specific projectjust serve-project <project_id>

# Run the MCP server (stdio transport)just serve
# Run with a specific projectjust serve-project <project_id>

Development

bash

# Format code (requires nightly rustfmt)just fmt
# Lint and format checkjust check
# Run all testsjust 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 metadatajust sqlx-prepare

# Format code (requires nightly rustfmt)just fmt
# Lint and format checkjust check
# Run all testsjust 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 metadatajust sqlx-prepare

Licence

MIT

Source: README.md at commit 1ab5854

Tools

SourceWeft has not started this package in its sandbox yet, so its tools are not known.

Version history

v0.4.1LatestSep 16, 2026

Score

40% of the applicable checks met

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DescriptionRequired15 pts
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Documentation15 pts
License10 pts
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