Tinderbox MCP Server

Tinderbox MCP server exists for a simple reason — assistants are far more useful when they can act on Tinderbox directly instead of describing what you should do. An MCP server for interacting with the knowledge management tool Tinderbox.

What you get

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that enables AI assistants like Claude to interact with Tinderbox, a powerful knowledge management application for macOS. This allows you to control Tinderbox with natural language and to connect it to other services that the assistant has access to. In the background, it uses the AppleScript integration of Tinderbox to create and update notes and to navigate the hierarchy of a document.

• Connect from Claude Mobile apps using Connectors
• Access your Tinderbox server from anywhere via Tailscale or Ngrok
• Share your Tinderbox server with team members securely
• Use modern OAuth authentication (GitHub) for secure access

Setting it up

Setup follows the usual MCP pattern — install or clone the server, register it in your client's configuration file, restart the client.

Configuration and credentials

You will need 4 environment variables: GITHUB_CLIENT_ID, GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET, DEFAULT_DOCUMENT, SERVER_HOST. The server will not start without them, which is usually why the tools fail to appear on a first run. Keep credentials in your client's env block or a secrets manager rather than in a file you might commit.

• Tinderbox - macOS (for Tinderbox AppleScript integration) - Python 3.10 or higher - A GitHub account (for OAuth authentication) - An MCP-compatible client (this was tested with Claude Desktop and Claude Mobile)

Before you rely on it

• It runs with your machine's permissions. That is convenient and also the reason to think about what you point it at before you approve a tool call.
• Missing credentials fail quietly in some clients — if no tools show up, check the environment block first.
• MCP clients confirm each tool call by default. Leave that on until you have watched what the tinderbox mcp server does with a few real requests.

Choosing this one

Among the developer tooling options, the useful question is rarely "what can it do" but "what does it cost you to run" — permissions, credentials, and how much of your context its toolset consumes. It is maintained by phkus; worth a glance at recent repository activity before you build anything load-bearing on it.

SyncDev reviews every entry in this directory against the project's own documentation before publishing, and revisits them as servers change.