Local-first Knowledge Base

A private, local-first evidence search system for TXT, CSV, Google Sheets, Zoho Mail and MBOX sources. It normalizes source documents into SQLite FTS5 and exposes cited results through a local web UI, CLI and MCP server.

The runtime does not call a paid LLM API. It returns evidence with source links instead of generating unsupported answers.

Features

• SQLite FTS5 index with rare-term scoring, character similarity, recency and reciprocal-rank fusion;

• idempotent TXT, CSV and Google Sheets ingestion;

• Google Sheets connector restricted to spreadsheets.readonly, one configured spreadsheet and configured sheet IDs;

• GET-only Zoho Mail connector with exact account and folder matching;

• local web UI bound to loopback only;

• MCP tools for cited retrieval and source status;

• no-answer gate for weak or unrelated matches;

• no model API keys or token-based LLM costs.

Related MCP server: Paper Memory MCP Lite

Quick start

Requirements: Python 3.11+ and Node.js only for the JavaScript syntax check.

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

cp data/lukasz_knowledge_base/config.example.json \
  data/lukasz_knowledge_base/config.json
cp data/lukasz_knowledge_base/internal_context.example.txt \
  data/lukasz_knowledge_base/internal_context.txt

python execution/lukasz_knowledge_base.py init
python execution/lukasz_knowledge_base.py ingest-txt \
  data/lukasz_knowledge_base/internal_context.txt
python execution/lukasz_knowledge_base.py serve

Open http://127.0.0.1:8765.

The server refuses to bind to a public interface because the MVP has no remote authentication.

Google Sheets

1. Create a dedicated Google service account.

2. Share only the required spreadsheet with that identity as Viewer.

3. Save its credential locally as service_account.json. This filename is ignored by Git.

4. Set the spreadsheet URL and allowed sheet_gids in the private config.json.

5. Run:

python execution/lukasz_knowledge_base.py sync-sheet

The connector constructs credentials with only:

https://www.googleapis.com/auth/spreadsheets.readonly

It uses spreadsheet metadata and value reads; it contains no Sheets write operation.

Zoho Mail

Create a dedicated folder such as Knowledge Base and a dedicated OAuth grant with read scopes only:

ZohoMail.accounts.READ
ZohoMail.folders.READ
ZohoMail.messages.READ

Provide credentials through local LOCAL_KB_ZOHO_* environment variables or an ignored token file, then run:

python execution/lukasz_knowledge_base.py sync-zoho

The default configuration blocks Inbox. Email source text is marked as untrusted evidence.

Search

python execution/lukasz_knowledge_base.py status
python execution/lukasz_knowledge_base.py search "What is our response process?"
python execution/lukasz_knowledge_base.py search "What is the offer?" --source internal_txt

Each result includes a snippet, source type, metadata, score and source URL. When the lexical evidence is too weak, the result list is empty.

MCP

Example MCP client entry:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "local-knowledge-base": {
      "command": "python",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/execution/lukasz_knowledge_base_mcp.py"],
      "env": {
        "LOCAL_KB_CONFIG": "/absolute/path/data/lukasz_knowledge_base/config.json"
      }
    }
  }
}

Available tools:

• search_knowledge

• list_knowledge_sources

• knowledge_base_status

Architecture

TXT / CSV / Google Sheets / Zoho / MBOX
                    |
        read-only source connectors
                    |
     normalized documents + provenance
                    |
    SQLite FTS5 + hybrid lexical ranking
                    |
      cited evidence + no-answer gate
                    |
             CLI / Web / MCP

Secret safety

Never commit private config.json, .env, service-account JSON, OAuth tokens, MBOX exports, internal context or generated databases. The included .gitignore excludes these files, but secret scanning and credential rotation remain the operator's responsibility.

Run the same checks used before publication:

python -m pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
python -m pytest -q
node --check execution/lukasz_knowledge_base_web/app.js
gitleaks detect --no-git --source . --redact

License

MIT