Zen MCP Server

by sheshbabu• 1.2k•• Scanned•Claim this listing•Request removal
Database Managementmarkdownmcp servernotespreactsqlite

Selfhosted notes app. Single golang binary, notes stored as markdown within SQLite, full-text search, very low resource usage

Zen is an open-source mcp server by sheshbabu, written mainly in JavaScript, with 1,194 GitHub stars and the AGPL-3.0 license. Its code was last updated Oct 25, 2026.

<p align="center"> <img width="256" src="assets/android-chrome-512x512.png"> <h1 align="center">Zen</h1> <p align="center"> <a href="https://zendemo.fly.dev">Live Demo</a> • <a href="http://sheshbabu.com/zen/">Features</a> • <a href="https://x.com/sheshbabu">Updates</a> </p> </p> <p align="center"><img src="https://github.com/sheshbabu/zen/blob/master/docs/screenshot.png?raw=true"/></p>

Features

  • Single Go binary or Docker Compose
  • Low resource usage
  • Standard Markdown files, local SQLite database
  • Organize with flexible tags, not rigid folders
  • Markdown features like tables, code blocks, task lists, highlights, and more
  • Full-text search with BM25 ranking
  • Import and export data with full portability
  • Templates
  • Pinned notes
  • Archive and soft delete notes
  • Bulk archive and delete
  • Version history
  • Internal note links with side panel preview
  • Minimal dependency footprint
  • Automated backups (via Zen Backup)
  • Import from other services (via Zen Import)

Experimental Features

  • Canvas for spatial organization of notes and images (stored as JSON Canvas)
  • Semantic search for notes and images (via Zen Intelligence)
  • Similar images (via Zen Intelligence)
  • MCP for searching, listing and reading notes

Installation

Build from source

$ make build

Local Development

Run the application using default configuration

$ make dev

Run the application in watch mode

Install air and esbuild

$ go install github.com/air-verse/air@latest
$ go install github.com/evanw/esbuild/cmd/esbuild@latest
$ make watch

Schema Migrations

  • Create new migration file under ./migrations
  • Use the format <version>_<title>.sql

Image Versioning

$ git tag x.y.z
$ git push origin x.y.z

Contributions

This is a personal project built for my own use. The codebase is available for forking and modifications. Note that I may not actively review pull requests or respond to issues due to time constraints.

Thanks

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