# Tribal

Keeps debugging notes, heuristics and decision rationale from your codebase and serves them to coding agents over MCP. Useful when that knowledge only lives in chat threads.

- MCP server · `type=mcp` · Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Windsurf (Devin Desktop), Cline, Zed · ★ 10
- Author: tribal-memory
- License: not stated · policy=link-only · description only; the file stays with the author
- Source: https://github.com/tribal-memory/tribal
- Updated: 2026-08-06
- HTML: https://affpapa.org/en/nevibecode/mcp/tribal

## What it does

Tribal is a context engine for software work. It stores the things nobody writes down: what a debugging session taught you, rules of thumb, why a design went one way. Coding agents then pull that back through MCP, so Claude, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf, Cline and Zed start from accumulated team experience instead of a blank slate.

The server is written in Rust and sits on top of Postgres. You build it from source, which means a stable Rust 1.89+ toolchain plus nightly for `rustfmt`, Docker for the local database and test containers, and the `just`, `sqlx-cli` and `cargo-deny` utilities. Skip Docker and there is no local Postgres to talk to, so start with `just db-up` and follow it with `just db-migrate`.

Run it with `just serve` for stdio transport, or `just serve-project <project_id>` when you want a single project loaded. The repo ships a set of development tasks covering formatting, checks, tests and a full pre-push pass. MIT licensed.

## Requirements
- Needs: Docker
- Environment variables: `TRIBAL_DATABASE__URL`, `TRIBAL_PROJECT_REMOTE`, `TRIBAL_PROJECT_NAME`, `TRIBAL_SERVER__TRANSPORT`, `TRIBAL_SERVER__BIND_ADDRESS`, `TRIBAL_PUBLIC_MCP_URL`, `OPENAI_API_KEY`, `ANTHROPIC_API_KEY` — keys and tokens: ask the human for the values, never commit them or put them in shared files.

## Install

### Claude Code (native platform)

**Install**
- The MCP registry has no launch command for it: see the repository README

## When to use it
- keep a hard-won bug analysis from disappearing into a chat log
- tell an agent why the codebase settled on a particular approach
- bring up a local Postgres and apply migrations in two commands
- run unit tests without a database connection
- share accumulated team knowledge across several coding agents

## Example prompts
- Start the Tribal MCP server with `just serve` and wire it into this project
- Bring up the database and apply migrations: `just db-up`, then `just db-migrate`
- Run the server for one project: `just serve-project <project_id>`

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