Alexandria

A self-hosted personal knowledge base shared by a human and their AI agents. Give it a URL and a reason; it fetches, archives and indexes the content, and remembers why you kept it. Agents read and write through MCP, you use a small web UI. One container, one volume.

• Articles — raw HTML, extracted Markdown, metadata, full-text search.

• Git repositories — a bare clone (full history, or the last 1,000 commits for huge repos) packed as repository.git.tar.gz, plus GitHub metadata and README.

• Documents — upload PDF, DOCX, EPUB, HTML, Markdown or text; the original is kept and its text extracted and indexed (links to such files get the same treatment). Any other file is kept too, ready to be analysed later.

• Notes — Markdown, searchable at once.

• Bulk import — paste links or upload a browser bookmarks export.

• Files are the truth — every resource is a folder with a resource.md; the SQLite index can be deleted and rebuilt.

Status

PoC, v1 feature-complete against the design, plus documents and bulk import (ADR-0012, ADR-0013). All ten acceptance criteria are covered by tests or were checked by hand (see docs/STATUS.md).

Related MCP server: Mnela MCP Server

Run it

From the published image (on a NAS: see docs/NAS.md):

docker run -d --name alexandria -p 8080:8080 -v "$PWD/data:/data" \
  ghcr.io/corentingi/alexandria:latest
docker logs alexandria | grep -A2 "shown once"   # the first-start admin token
open http://localhost:8080                       # paste the token to sign in

Or build from source with docker compose up -d --build (data in ./data, or set ALEXANDRIA_VOLUME). The volume must be local storage (no NFS/SMB) and writable by uid 1000.

More tokens: Settings → Tokens (create, change scope, revoke), or docker exec alexandria alexandria token create claude --scope write.

Connect an agent

claude mcp add --transport http alexandria http://<host>:8080/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer <token>"

Tools: search, get_resource, get_content, list_recent, list_tags (read); ingest_url, create_note, update_resource, attach_url, refetch (write). Fetched text is returned under untrusted_content.

REST API at /api/v1 (docs at /api/docs), including POST /documents (multipart) and POST /import. The UI's Settings page has a bookmarklet. CLI: alexandria add <url>, alexandria upload <files…>, alexandria import <bookmarks.html>, alexandria note.

Restore a repository archive

tar -xzf repository.git.tar.gz && git clone repository.git my-checkout

Back up

resources/ and tokens.yaml are plain files: rsync or NAS snapshots are safe. alexandria backup <dir> also copies the database with VACUUM INTO; or rebuild it with alexandria reindex (only the job queue is lost).

Move a library

Settings → Export & import the library writes the whole library as plain .tar parts of about 2 GB each (export.part_mb). Each part stands alone: import them in any order, here or on another installation. Anything already present is skipped, never overwritten. From a shell: alexandria library export [--out DIR] and alexandria library import <parts…>. See ADR-0015.

Configuration

Environment variables ALEXANDRIA_* (nested with __, e.g. ALEXANDRIA_GITHUB__TOKEN) over <data>/config.yaml. See docs/DESIGN.md §13.

Docs

• docs/DESIGN.md — the v1 design.

• docs/ARCHITECTURE.md — how the code is organized.

• docs/NAS.md — installing on a NAS from the published image.

• docs/DEVELOPMENT.md — running, testing, the gate.

• docs/adrs/ — decisions and their costs.

• docs/STATUS.md — acceptance criteria, known limits, next steps.

Security

Alexandria is built for a home or office network, not the open internet.

• Every request needs a token. Tokens are random 256-bit secrets, stored only as SHA-256 hashes in tokens.yaml; scopes are read, write and admin. The browser keeps the token in an HttpOnly, SameSite cookie, with CSRF protection on every form.

• There is no rate limiting and no TLS of its own. For access from outside, use a VPN (Tailscale, WireGuard, your NAS's VPN), not port forwarding. Behind an https reverse proxy, set ALEXANDRIA_HTTP__PUBLIC_URL so the cookie is marked Secure.

• Fetched pages and files are treated as untrusted: private and local addresses are refused (SSRF guard on every redirect), archives and documents are size-capped, the UI renders Markdown without raw HTML or remote images under a strict CSP, and agents get fetched text under untrusted_* keys.

• Report a vulnerability privately through GitHub's Security → Report a vulnerability on this repository rather than in a public issue.

Decisions and their costs are in docs/adrs/, notably ADR-0007 and ADR-0010.

Licence

GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later. You may use, change and share Alexandria; if you offer a modified version to others, including over a network, you must make its source available under the same licence.