Cairn MCP Server

A self-hosted persistent memory platform for AI agents and humans. Store something once, find it later, across sessions, across projects. Four containers. docker compose up. Done.

Cairn is the memory brain. Your agent runtime handles execution — Cairn handles knowing. What decisions were made, what facts are known, what patterns emerge across projects.

It's built for the systems person. The curious. The t-shaped. The ones who need a memory that works the way they do, across everything, all at once.

Quick Start

1. Pull and run

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jasondostal/cairn-mcp/main/docker-compose.yml
docker compose up -d

Four containers start:

• cairn on port 8000 (MCP server + REST API)
• cairn-ui on port 3000 (web dashboard)
• cairn-db (PostgreSQL 16 + pgvector)
• cairn-graph (Neo4j 5, knowledge graph)

Migrations run on first boot. Ready in about a minute.

2. Connect your IDE

Add this to your MCP config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "cairn": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "http://localhost:8000/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Where that goes:

Or run the setup wizard — it walks you through everything: LLM backend, database, embeddings, auth, and IDE configuration:

git clone https://github.com/jasondostal/cairn-mcp.git && ./cairn-mcp/scripts/setup.sh

Pick a tier (local dev, recommended, enterprise, or custom) and the wizard collects only what that tier needs. Supports --dry-run and --non-interactive for CI.

3. Use it

Tell your agent to remember something:

"Remember that we chose PostgreSQL for storage because it handles hybrid search without a separate vector DB."

Search for it later:

"What did we decide about the storage layer?"

That's it. 11 tools available. The ones you'll use most:

The rest: modify, insights, think, status, consolidate, ingest.

What's in the box

Memory that persists across sessions. Your agent makes a decision at 2am. Ne

... View full README on GitHub