reminders-mcp

An MCP server for controlling macOS Reminders.

Tools

Dates: "YYYY-MM-DD" for all-day, or ISO 8601 like "2026-11-05T15:00" (local time unless an offset is given).

Related MCP server: Reminders MCP Server

How it works

• helper/main.swift → bin/reminders-helper: a one-shot EventKit CLI that does nearly all the work. EventKit is fast, can tell timed from all-day due dates, and can clear fields, which Reminders' AppleScript interface cannot.

• EventKit has no public API for the flagged state, so that one field is read and written through JXA (osascript).

• src/ is the TypeScript MCP server (stdio) that calls both.

A reminder created through EventKit can take a few seconds to appear in Reminders' scripting interface. Setting a flag at creation therefore retries for up to ~8 s. If the flag still can't be set or read, the reminder is returned with flagged: null and a warning instead of an error, since it was saved and retrying the whole call would duplicate it.

Setup

Requires macOS 14+, Node 18+, and Xcode command line tools (swiftc).

npm install
npm run build
claude mcp add --scope user reminders -- node "$PWD/dist/index.js"

On first use macOS asks the host app (Terminal, Claude, …) for access to Reminders (EventKit) and to automate Reminders (flags). If you denied it, re-enable it under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Reminders / Automation.

For Claude Desktop, add to ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "reminders": { "command": "node", "args": ["/absolute/path/to/reminders-mcp/dist/index.js"] }
  }
}

License

MIT, see LICENSE.