MemPalace

Local-first AI memory. Verbatim storage, pluggable backend, 96.6% R@5 raw on LongMemEval — zero API calls.

[![][version-shield]][release-link] [![][python-shield]][python-link] [![][license-shield]][license-link] [![][discord-shield]][discord-link]

[!CAUTION] Beware of impostor sites. MemPalace has no other official websites. The only official sources are this GitHub repository, the PyPI package, and the docs at mempalaceofficial.com. Any other domain (including .tech, .net, or other .com variants) is an impostor and may distribute malware. Details and timeline: docs/HISTORY.md.

[!IMPORTANT] Claude Code sessions expire in 30 days without auto-save hooks wired. Read this →

Need the shortest recovery/setup path? Use the Claude Code retention setup checklist.

What it is

MemPalace stores your conversation history as verbatim text and retrieves it with semantic search. It does not summarize, extract, or paraphrase. The index is structured — people and projects become wings, topics become rooms, and original content lives in drawers — so searches can be scoped rather than run against a flat corpus.

The retrieval layer is pluggable. The current default is ChromaDB; the interface is defined in mempalace/backends/base.py and alternative backends can be dropped in without touching the rest of the system.

Nothing leaves your machine unless you opt in.

Architecture, concepts, and mining flows: mempalaceofficial.com/concepts/the-palace.

Install

Agent-guided setup

Install the MemPalace skills first, then ask your coding agent to set up MemPalace. The setup skill detects your system, installs the Python package, configures MCP, and asks whether you want a private local palace, a shared-brain hub, or a client connected to an existing hub:

npx skills add MemPalace/mempalace

The repository exposes three skills: mempalace for guided installation and operations, mempalace-recall for search-before-answer recall, and mempalace-task for logstream delegation. Installing a skill does not by itself install the MemPalace CLI or MCP server; the setup skill guides the agent through those system changes and verifies the live connection.

During guided setup the agent can offer weekly stable-release checks. They are disabled by default, contact only PyPI when enabled, and never install updates automatically. Cached availability appears in scoped mempalace_status fields for the serving runtime and, when a local proxy is present, its client runtime, allowing the agent to explain the release and request authorization before showing an exact upgrade plan. Setup records whether the runtime came from uv tool, pipx, or pip so the plan never proposes an upgrade command for the wrong installation.

Direct CLI setup

MemPalace ships a CLI, so install it in an isolated environment to avoid PEP 668 errors on Debian/Ubuntu/Homebrew Pythons and to keep mempalace's deps (chromadb, numpy, grpcio, …) from conflicting with anything else in your global site-packages.

We recommend uv — uv tool install puts the mempalace CLI in an isolated environment on your PATH:

uv tool install mempalace
mempalace init ~/projects/myapp

pipx works the same way if you prefer it: pipx install mempalace.

Prefer plain pip only inside an activated virtualenv where you explicitly want import mempalace available:

python -m venv .venv && source

... [View full README on GitHub](https://github.com/MemPalace/mempalace#readme)