What are the Harbor CLI and MCP server?

They’re the two main ways to drive Harbor from outside the apps — by script, or by AI.

The harbor CLI

A command-line client that exposes the entire Harbor API: notes, notebooks, tags, search, reminders, templates, sharing — all of it. It’s built for automation the way a tool should be: every command takes --json and prints clean, machine-readable output; exit codes are stable; errors are structured. harbor openapi prints the full OpenAPI spec for anything that wants to learn the API wholesale.

That makes the classic tricks easy — cron a nightly export, pipe search results into other tools, capture a note from any shell script. And it ships harbor skill install, which teaches Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor to be a genuinely capable Harbor assistant.

The MCP server

Available at launch, the MCP server speaks the Model Context Protocol — the open standard AI applications use to reach outside tools. Connect it to an MCP-capable assistant and your notes become something the AI can read, create, search, and organize directly, no scripting required.

What they share

Both authenticate with Personal Access Tokens you create and can revoke; third-party apps can use OAuth instead. And both respect encryption absolutely: encrypted notes are unreadable to our servers, so no token, CLI command, or MCP call can ever reach them.

This openness is the heart of Bring Your Own AI — and a quiet promise: your data stays scriptable, portable, and yours.