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

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.

Setting it up is one string. Add https://app.harbor.my/mcp to Claude or ChatGPT as a custom connector and approve the login — there’s no token to create and nothing to turn on. Step by step →

What they share

Both address a single note by its ID, which you copy out of the note’s Info panel — here’s where to find it. Both authenticate with Personal Access Tokens you create and can revoke; third-party apps can use OAuth instead. And both inherit the limit our servers have: an encrypted note leaves them as ciphertext, because ciphertext is all we hold — and the MCP server doesn’t even send that, just a marker saying the note is locked. What happens next differs. An assistant reading over MCP is stuck there. The CLI isn’t, because it runs on your machine rather than ours: give it your passphrase and it decrypts locally. Your key, your call.

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

Wondering how this compares elsewhere? We checked which notes apps ship an MCP server and which leave it to volunteers: MCP servers for notes, explained.