Roam Research MCP + CLI

Introduction

I created this project to solve a personal problem: I wanted to manage my Roam Research graph directly from Claude Code (and other LLMs). As I built the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server to give AI agents access to my notes, I realized the underlying tools were powerful enough to stand on their own.

What started as an backend for AI agents evolved into a full-featured Standalone CLI. Now, you can use the same powerful API capabilities directly from your terminal—piping content into Roam, searching your graph, and managing tasks—without needing an LLM at all.

Whether you want to give Claude superpowers over your knowledge base or just want a robust CLI for your own scripts, this project has you covered.

Standalone CLI: roam

The roam CLI lets you interact with your graph directly from the terminal. It supports standard input (stdin) piping for all content creation and retrieval commands, making it perfect for automation workflows.

Quick Examples

# Save a quick thought to your daily page
roam save "Idea: A CLI for Roam would be cool"

# Pipe content from a file to a new page
cat meeting_notes.md | roam save --title "Meeting: Project Alpha"

# Create a TODO item on today's daily page
echo "Buy milk" | roam save --todo

# Prepend to top of page (newest-first ordering)
roam save -p "Changelog" --order first "v2.18.0 release"

# Search your graph and pipe results to another tool
roam search "important" --json | jq .

# Search for pages by namespace prefix
roam search --namespace "Convention"    # Finds all Convention/* pages

# Fetch a page by title
roam get "Roam Research"

# Fetch daily pages using any date format (auto-normalized)
roam get today                          # Today's daily page
roam get 2026-03-21                     # ISO date → "March 21st, 2026"
roam get "03/21/2026"                   # US date → "March 21st, 2026"
roam get "March 21"                     # Named (assumes current year)

# Fetch a block with ancestors (parent chain to page root)
roam get abc123def -a              # Block + children + ancestors
roam get abc123def -a -d 0         # Ancestors only, no children

# Fetch page by UID or Roam URL
roam get page abc123def
roam get page "https://roamresearch.com/#/app/my-graph/page/abc123def"

# Sort and group results
roam get --tag Project --sort created --group-by tag

# Find references (backlinks) to a page
roam refs "Project Alpha"

# Update a block (e.g., toggle TODO status)
roam update ((block-uid)) --todo

# Multi-graph: read from a specific graph
roam get "Page Title" -g work

# Multi-graph: write to a protected graph
roam save "Note" -g work --write-key "$ROAM_SYSTEM_WRITE_KEY"

Available Commands: get, search, save, refs, update, batch, rename, status. Run roam <command> --help for details on any command.

Installation

npm install -g roam-research-mcp
# The 'roam' command is now available globally

MCP Server Tools

The MCP server exposes these tools

... View full README on GitHub