granola-mcp

MCP server for Granola — exposes meeting notes, AI summaries, and transcripts to Claude via the Model Context Protocol.

macOS only. The server wraps granola-cli, which authenticates via the macOS Keychain. It cannot run on Linux or in a Docker container without modifications to the CLI itself — see Why macOS only? below.

Tools

Related MCP server: mcp-granola

Prerequisites

granola-cli installed and authenticated:

brew install tmcinerney/tap/granola-cli
granola auth login

granola-mcp 0.2.0 requires granola-cli 0.2.0 or later. Transcript source labels (microphone, system) identify capture channels, not people. The MCP server only renders individual names that Granola includes in raw transcript segments, and never maps calendar attendees to speakers.

uv installed:

brew install uv

Setup

Claude Code

Add to your project's .mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "granola": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["--from", "git+https://github.com/tmcinerney/granola-mcp", "granola-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Claude Desktop / Cowork

Add to ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "granola": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["--from", "git+https://github.com/tmcinerney/granola-mcp", "granola-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Authentication

On auth errors the server automatically runs granola auth login and retries. On macOS this is non-interactive — credentials are read from the Keychain. If a biometrics or Keychain prompt stalls for more than 30 seconds the server gives up and surfaces an error rather than hanging indefinitely.

If you ever need to re-authenticate manually:

granola auth login

Local development

git clone https://github.com/tmcinerney/granola-mcp
cd granola-mcp

Point your MCP config at the local clone instead of the git URL:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "granola": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "uv",
      "args": ["run", "--project", "/path/to/granola-mcp", "granola-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Why macOS only?

Claude Code runs in a sandbox without access to the macOS Keychain. granola-cli authenticates with Granola's API via a token stored in the Keychain — there's no env var or flag-based override. This server runs as a native macOS process alongside Claude, bridges the sandbox gap, and exposes the CLI's output as MCP tools.

Running in a Linux container would require forking granola-cli to add a non-keychain auth path (e.g. a GRANOLA_TOKEN env var). The CLI uses the keyring crate with no fallback for headless environments.

See granola-cli for the underlying CLI this server wraps.