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Self-hosted MCP memory server with hybrid BM25 + semantic search, backed by PostgreSQL +
pgvector

Self-hosted MCP memory server for personal use and teams

License Python Version MCP Ruff MCP score

Quickstart • How It Works • MCP Tools • Configuration • Requirements • License


✨ Features

  • 🔍 Hybrid search — BM25 (full-text) + vector KNN (pgvector) fused via Reciprocal Rank Fusion
  • 📂 Multi-user — each user sees only their own memories; workspaces for shared team knowledge
  • 🛠️ 11 MCP tools — store, retrieve, recall, list, search by tag, get, update, delete, move, list workspaces, dream report
  • 💤 Dreaming — a guided consolidation pass (dream MCP prompt + dream_report tool): finds near-duplicate and conflicting memories, merges them into insights non-destructively, driven by the client LLM
  • 🌐 Web UI — browse, search, edit and delete memories in the browser; export/import JSON
  • 🔒 OAuth 2.1 — full in-process authorization server, always enabled
  • 🐘 PostgreSQL — pgvector for embeddings, tsvector for full-text search
  • 📊 Progressive disclosure — search returns compact snippets by default; call get_memory(name) only for what you need, reducing token usage
  • 🔁 Deduplication — automatically detects near-identical memories before saving, preventing noise accumulation

🆚 How Memlord compares

Memlord OpenMemory mcp-memory-service basic-memory
Search BM25 + vector + RRF Vector only (Qdrant) BM25 + vector + RRF BM25 + vector
Embeddings Local ONNX, zero config OpenAI default; Ollama optional Local ONNX, zero config Local FastEmbed
Storage PostgreSQL + pgvector PostgreSQL + Qdrant SQLite-vec / Cloudflare Vectorize SQLite + Markdown files
Multi-user ✅ ❌ single-user in practice ⚠️ agent-ID scoping, no isolation ❌
Workspaces ✅ shared + personal, invite links ⚠️ "Apps" namespace ⚠️ tags + conversation_id ✅ per-project flag
Authentication ✅ OAuth 2.1 ❌ none (self-hosted) ✅ OAuth 2.0 + PKCE ❌
Web UI ✅ browse, edit, export ✅ Next.js dashboard ✅ rich UI, graph viz, quality scores ❌ local; cloud only
MCP tools 11 5 15+ ~20
Self-hosted ✅ single process ✅ Docker (3 containers) ✅ ✅
Memory input Manual (explicit store) Auto-extracted by LLM Manual Manual (Markdown notes)
Memory types fact / preference / instruction / feedback / decision / insight auto-extracted facts — observations + wiki links
Time-aware search ✅ natural language dates ⚠️ REST only, not in MCP tools — ✅ recent_activity
Token efficiency ✅ progressive disclosure ❌ — ✅ build_context traversal
Import / Export ✅ JSON ✅ ZIP (JSON + JSONL) — ✅ Markdown (human-readable)
License AGPL-3.0 / Commercial Apache 2.0 Apache 2.0 AGPL-3.0

Where competitors have a real edge:

  • OpenMemory — auto-extracts memories from raw conversation text; no need to decide what to store manually; good import/export
  • mcp-memory-service — richer web UI (graph visualization, quality scoring, 8 tabs); more permissive license (Apache 2.0); multiple transport options (stdio, SSE, HTTP)
  • basic-memory — memories are human-readable Markdown files you can edit, version-control, and read without any server; wiki-style entity links form a local knowledge graph; ~20 MCP tools

When to pick Memlord:

  • You want zero-config local embeddings — ONNX model ships with the server, no Ollama or external API needed
  • You run a multi-user team server with proper OAuth 2.1 auth and invite-based workspaces
  • You want a production-grade database (PostgreSQL) that scales beyond a single machine's SQLite
  • You manage memories explicitly — store exactly what matters, typed and tagged, not everything the LLM decides to extract
  • You want a self-hosted Web UI with full CRUD and JSON export, without a cloud subscription

🚀 Quickstart

🐳 Docker

cp .env.example .env
docker compose up

HTTP server (multi-user, Web UI, OAuth)

# Install dependencies
uv sync --dev

# Download ONNX model (~23 MB)
uv run python scripts/download_model.py

# Run migrations
alembic upgrade head

# Start the server
memlord

Open http://localhost:8000 for the Web UI. The MCP endpoint is at /mcp.


🔍 How It Works

Each search request runs BM25 and vector KNN in parallel, then merges results via Reciprocal Rank Fusion:

flowchart TD
    Q([query]) --> BM25["BM25\nsearch_vector @@ websearch_to_tsquery"]
    Q --> EMB["ONNX embed\nparaphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2 · 384d · local"]
    EMB --> KNN["KNN\nembedding <=> query_vector\ncosine distance"]
    BM25 --> RRF["RRF fusion\nscore = 1/(k+rank_bm25) + 1/(k+rank_vec)\nk=60"]
    KNN --> RRF
    RRF --> R([top-N results])

⚙️ Configuration

All settings use the MEMLORD_ prefix. See .env.example for the full list.

Variable Default Description
MEMLORD_DB_URL postgresql+asyncpg://postgres:postgres@localhost/memlord PostgreSQL connection URL
MEMLORD_PORT 8000 Server port
MEMLORD_BASE_URL http://localhost:8000 Public URL for OAuth (HTTP mode)
MEMLORD_OAUTH_JWT_SECRET memlord-dev-secret-please-change JWT signing secret (HTTP mode)

Set MEMLORD_BASE_URL to your public URL and change MEMLORD_OAUTH_JWT_SECRET before deploying.


🛠️ MCP Tools

Tool Description
store_memory Save a memory (idempotent by content); raises on near-duplicates; optional expires_at
retrieve_memory Hybrid semantic + full-text search; returns snippets by default
recall_memory Search by natural-language time expression; returns snippets by default
list_memories Paginated list with type/tag filters
search_by_tag AND/OR tag search
get_memory Fetch a single memory by name with full content (expired included)
update_memory Update content, type, tags, metadata, or expiry by name (and optionally rename)
delete_memory Delete by name
move_memory Move a memory to a different workspace
list_workspaces List workspaces you are a member of (including personal)
dream_report Read-only consolidation candidates: similar memory pairs, expired and expiring-soon memories

The dream MCP prompt walks the client LLM through a full consolidation pass over the dream_report output: classify similar pairs (duplicate / complementary / conflict), merge into insight memories, retire superseded ones via expires_at — never destructively.

Workspace management (create, invite, join, leave) is handled via the Web UI.


💻 System Requirements

  • Python 3.12
  • PostgreSQL ≥ 15 with pgvector extension
  • uv — Python package manager

👨‍💻 Development

pyright src/           # type check
ruff format .          # format
pytest                 # run tests
alembic-autogen-check  # verify migrations are up to date

📄 License

Memlord is dual-licensed:

Release files for memlord 0.3.2

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