tackboard-mcp — an optional MCP adapter

A small Model Context Protocol server that exposes one tack project board to an MCP client (an IDE assistant, a chat client, another agent runtime).

This package is optional and outside the core. The tackboard package — the CLI, the database, the JSON contracts — stays dependency-free and does not import anything here. If you only want the board, install tackboard; if your agent runtime speaks MCP and you would rather it called tools than assembled shell commands, install this beside it.

What it is, precisely

The adapter contains no domain logic. Every tool shells out to the tack CLI with --json and returns that document unchanged, so a client can never see a claim, a transition or a validation rule that differs from the board. A non-zero exit is raised as an error whose payload is the CLI's own error document ({"schema_version":1,"error":{...}}).

What it adds is discovery and a typed surface: seven named tools with described arguments, instead of a CLI string to compose.

Install

uv tool install tackboard-mcp      # or: pip install tackboard-mcp

This installs the adapter and pulls tackboard with it, so the tack CLI comes along in the same environment. The MCP framework and the core are this package's dependencies, and they are declared here — never in the core.

TACK_CMD remains available for unusual environments where the adapter and the CLI live in separate environments; set it to the command that invokes tack (for example TACK_CMD="uv run tack").

Configure

The server reads three environment variables:

TACKBOARD_DB=~/.local/state/board.sqlite3 TACKBOARD_AGENT=assistant tackboard-mcp

The process speaks MCP over stdio. Register it with your client the way that client documents stdio servers:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "tackboard": {
      "command": "tackboard-mcp",
      "env": {
        "TACKBOARD_DB": "/path/to/board.sqlite3",
        "TACKBOARD_AGENT": "assistant"
      }
    }
  }
}

Tools

Every tool declares all four MCP annotation hints as explicit booleans. The two read tools (board_brief, show) are read-only and repeatable; every mutating tool writes only the one local board and touches no external system (openWorldHint false); nothing on this surface deletes data (destructiveHint false); and complete is idempotent while next_claim, note, release and create are not.

Each tool returns the CLI's JSON document unchanged. Exit codes are not translated into a second vocabulary: a failed call raises with the CLI's error.code, exit_code and details intact.

Tests

uv run pytest packages/tackboard-mcp/tests

The tool layer is tested without the framework: argument mapping against a fake transport, plus a scratch board driven through the real CLI. The binding tests (test_server.py) run only when mcp is installed — including a real client handshake over stdio — and skip otherwise, so the core suite never needs the framework.

Limits

• One board per process: the database is fixed at start-up.
• The web view and the schema commands are not exposed; they are not tool-shaped.
• --force is reachable only through release's reason, deliberately: the other force cases are operator decisions, not assistant ones.