open-notebook-mcp-skill

An installable Agent Skill (+ setup guide) for driving Open Notebook from Claude and other MCP clients — through two MCP servers: open-notebook-mcp (pilot your instance) and content-core (standalone content extraction/summarization).

Open Notebook is an open-source, privacy-focused alternative to Google's NotebookLM (notebooks, sources, notes, chat, vector search, podcasts). This repo reimplements nothing: it teaches an assistant how to call your Open Notebook instance over MCP, including the real gotchas.

It is agnostic of where your instance runs (local, self-hosted, anywhere) and of which AI providers it uses — it only needs the instance URL and, if enabled, a password.

Agent Skill — copy the skill/ folder into your tool's skills directory, e.g.:

cp -r skill ~/.claude/skills/open-notebook

Wire the MCP servers. Both run over stdio via uvx (from uv).

Claude Code (CLI) — run in an interactive terminal:

claude mcp add open-notebook \
  -e OPEN_NOTEBOOK_URL={{OPEN_NOTEBOOK_URL}} \
  -e OPEN_NOTEBOOK_PASSWORD='<from a secrets manager>' \
  -- uvx --with 'mcp<2' open-notebook-mcp

claude mcp add content-core -- uvx --from content-core content-core-mcp

Claude Desktop / VS Code (JSON) — see skill/references/mcp-setup.md for the mcpServers block and the full tool list.

Open Notebook also ships its own MCP integration docs if you prefer its official path.

• {{OPEN_NOTEBOOK_URL}} = the root URL of your instance — without /api (the MCP appends /api itself). Locally that's typically http://localhost:5055.
• Password: if your instance has password protection enabled, open-notebook-mcp needs OPEN_NOTEBOOK_PASSWORD.

⚠️ Never hard-code your instance URL, password or any API key in a version-controlled file — use environment variables or your client's credential store.

• mcp<2 is mandatory for open-notebook-mcp — the 2.x mcp SDK renamed FastMCP and the server crashes on start with no tools exposed. Launch it with uvx --with 'mcp<2' (as above).
• URL is the root, without /api — the MCP adds /api/... to every call. http://host → OK; http://host/api → /api/api/... → 404.

See skill/references/mcp-setup.md and skill/references/extraction.md for the full details, the tool lists, and how Open Notebook's URL-extraction engines (Auto/Firecrawl/Jina/Crawl4AI/Simple) work.

See ATTRIBUTION.md. Open Notebook, content-core and open-notebook-mcp are the work of their respective authors (Open Notebook & content-core: @lfnovo; open-notebook-mcp: Epochal-dev). This kit is licensed under MIT.