Chroma MCP Server

If you want an AI assistant working directly with Chroma, the chroma mcp server is the bridge. Embeddings, vector search, document storage, and full-text search with the open-source AI application database.

What Chroma does

The fastest way to build Python or JavaScript LLM apps with memory!

Key capabilities

• Flexible Client Types —
• Ephemeral (in-memory) for testing and development
• Persistent for file-based storage
• HTTP client for self-hosted Chroma instances
• Cloud client for Chroma Cloud integration (automatically connects to api.trychroma.com)
• Collection Management —
• Create, modify, and delete collections
• List all collections with pagination support

Tools it exposes

Once connected, the assistant can call these 13 tools directly:

• chroma_list_collections — List all collections with pagination support
• chroma_create_collection — Create a new collection with optional HNSW configuration
• chroma_peek_collection — View a sample of documents in a collection
• chroma_get_collection_info — Get detailed information about a collection
• chroma_get_collection_count — Get the number of documents in a collection
• chroma_modify_collection — Update a collection's name or metadata
• chroma_delete_collection — Delete a collection
• chroma_add_documents — Add documents with optional metadata and custom IDs
• chroma_query_documents — Query documents using semantic search with advanced filtering
• chroma_get_documents — Retrieve documents by IDs or filters with pagination
• chroma_update_documents — Update existing documents' content, metadata, or embeddings
• chroma_delete_documents — Delete specific documents from a collection
• Demos — Find reference usages, such as shared knowledge bases & adding memory to context windows in the [Chroma MCP

Installing the chroma mcp server

Setup follows the standard MCP pattern: clone or install the server, then register it in your client's configuration file and restart the client. The configuration snippets on this page cover Claude Desktop, Claude Code and Cursor.

Configuration

Before the server will start you need to supply 8 environment variables: CHROMA_CLIENT_TYPE, CHROMA_DATA_DIR, CHROMA_TENANT, CHROMA_DATABASE, CHROMA_API_KEY, CHROMA_HOST, CHROMA_PORT, CHROMA_CUSTOM_AUTH_CREDENTIALS. Keep credentials in your client's env block or a secrets manager rather than committing them.

Where it fits

File and storage servers are what separate an assistant that talks about your documents from one that actually works with them. Chroma sits in that group, and the shape of its toolset — chroma_list_collections, chroma_create_collection, chroma_peek_collection among others — tells you what it is really for. Worth comparing against the other file systems servers in this directory before you commit to one, since several overlap in scope but differ sharply in setup cost and permissions.

Practical notes

• This is a hosted server — you point your client at an endpoint rather than running a local process, so there is nothing to keep updated on your machine.
• It will not start until its required credentials are present, so set those before wondering why the tools never appear.
• With 13 tools exposed, expect a noticeable bump in prompt size — disable it in projects that never use Chroma.
• Written in Python.
• MCP clients ask for confirmation before each tool call by default. Keep that on while you learn what the chroma mcp server actually does with your data.
• Every entry in this directory is reviewed by hand before it goes live, and details are checked against the project's own documentation.