daily-stoic-mcp

An MCP tool (get_daily_stoic) that serves one daily entry — quote, title, source, and full reflection — from The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday & Stephen Hanselman, keyed by MM-DD. Built to feed a "daily motivation" box in a briefing/dashboard tool.

What's here vs. what isn't

This repo ships code only: the MCP tool, an EPUB parser, and a static page generator. It does not ship daily-stoic.json or any generated HTML pages — those contain the book's actual text (quotes and full daily reflections), and redistributing all 366 days of a commercial book's content would go well beyond fair use. You generate your own data file from your own copy of the book.

Related MCP server: Day One MCP Server

Setup

1. Get a .epub copy of The Daily Stoic you're licensed to read, and place it at book.epub next to parse_daily_stoic.py.

2. Parse it:

   python3 parse_daily_stoic.py

   Produces daily-stoic.json (366 entries, keyed MM-DD, each {date_label, title, quote, source, body}). Delete book.epub afterward if you don't want the raw copyrighted source sitting around — the JSON is all the tool needs.

   The parser handles three paragraph-class layouts found across editions' XHTML (a common case, a body-text fallback, and a verse/poem fallback for entries with multi-line epigraphs). If your EPUB's markup differs, expect to adjust parse_part().

3. (Optional) Generate static "micro learning" pages, e.g. to serve a tap-through link for the full reflection:

   python3 gen_stoic_pages.py daily-stoic.json stoic-pages/

4. Wire the tool into your MCP server:

   import { registerDailyStoicTool } from "daily-stoic-mcp";
   
   registerDailyStoicTool(server, {
     dataPath: "/path/to/daily-stoic.json",
     pageBase: "https://your-host/stoic-pages", // optional, omit to skip the URL line
   });

   dataPath and pageBase can also be set via DAILY_STOIC_DATA_PATH / DAILY_STOIC_PAGE_BASE env vars instead of passing options.

Tool

get_daily_stoic(date?: "MM-DD") — defaults to today. Returns a single text block: date/title header, the quote, the source, optionally a full-reflection URL, then the full body after a ---BODY--- marker.

License

Code: MIT (see LICENSE). This license does not extend to any daily-stoic.json or generated pages you produce — that content remains the publisher's copyright.