What is Outline Mcp Server

Outline MCP Server is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that facilitates interaction with the Outline API, allowing AI agents to manage documents, collections, and other entities programmatically through the Outline knowledge base platform.

Use cases

Use cases include automating document creation and management, querying documents using natural language, organizing documents into collections, and integrating with AI assistants for enhanced productivity.

How to use

To use Outline MCP Server, install it via npm or run it directly with npx, ensuring you have a valid Outline API key. Once set up, you can interact with the server using AI assistants that support MCP, issuing commands to manage documents and collections.

Key features

Key features include document management (create, update, delete, search, and archive documents), collection management (create and update collections), comment management (create, update, delete comments), and user management (list and filter users).

Where to use

Outline MCP Server can be used in various fields such as content management, project management, knowledge management, and any application that requires structured document handling and AI integration.

Outline MCP Server

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A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that provides tools for interacting with Outline’s API, enabling AI agents to manage documents, collections, and other entities programmatically through the Outline knowledge base platform.

🚨 **Upgrade Notice:** v5 has introduced several breaking changes: 🚨

• support has been dropped for the stdio transport interfaces.
  • This server now exposes:
    • a Streamable-HTTP endpoint at the /mcp route.
    • an SSE endpoint at /sse
  • If you require stdio, downgrade to v4
• the --port CLI flag has been migrated to an environment variable, OUTLINE_MCP_PORT
• Minimum node version has been bumped to 20

Features

• Document Management

  • ✅ Create new documents with customizable properties
  • ✅ Get document details
  • ✅ Update existing documents
  • ✅ Delete documents
  • ✅ List documents
  • ✅ Search documents
  • ✅ Ask natural language questions about documents
  • ✅ Create templates from existing documents
  • ✅ Move documents to different collections or locations
  • ✅ Archive documents

• Collection Management

  • ✅ Get collection details
  • ✅ List collections
  • ✅ Create and update collections

• Comment Management

  • ✅ Create comments on documents
  • ✅ Update existing comments
  • ✅ Delete comments

• User Management

  • ✅ List and filter users

Quick Start

Prerequisites

• Node.js (v20 or higher)
• Outline account with API access
• Outline API key with appropriate permissions
• Note: if you need to use the AI-powered ask feature, you must enable the “AI Answers” feature in your Outline Workspace settings

Installation

# (preferred) Run directly with npx
OUTLINE_API_KEY=... npx outline-mcp-server

# or install from npm
npm install -g outline-mcp-server
OUTLINE_API_KEY=... outline-mcp-server

Env

• OUTLINE_API_KEY (required): your API key for outline, duh
• OUTLINE_API_URL (optional): Alternative URL for your outline API (if using an alt domain/self-hosting)
• OUTLINE_MCP_PORT (optional): Specify the port on which the server will run (default: 6060)

Usage

Once installed, you can use the MCP server with AI assistants that support the Model Context Protocol, such as Claude via Cursor.

Example queries your AI assistant can now handle:

• “List all the documents in my Outline workspace”
• “Create a new document in the ‘Product’ collection”
• “Find all documents related to a specific topic”
• “Ask a natural language question about your documents”
• “Create a template from an existing document”
• “Update the content of a document”
• “Add a comment to a document”

Run the MCP server

# Default port 6060
OUTLINE_API_KEY=... npm run start:http

# Or specify a custom port
OUTLINE_API_KEY=... OUTLINE_MCP_PORT=9001 npm run start:http

Development

# Clone this repository
git clone https://github.com/mmmeff/outline-mcp.git
cd outline-mcp

# Install dependencies
npm install

Create a .env file with your Outline API key:

OUTLINE_API_KEY=your_outline_api_key_here

# Optional -------
# OUTLINE_API_URL=https://your-outline-instance.com/api # defaults to https://app.getoutline.com/api
# OUTLINE_MCP_PORT=9001

# Builds/watches the project alongside running @modelcontextprotocol/inspector
npm run dev

Contributing

This project uses semantic-release for automated versioning and package publishing. Please follow the Conventional Commits specification for your commit messages to ensure proper versioning.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for detailed guidelines on how to contribute to this project.

Release Process

Releases are fully automated using semantic-release and GitHub Actions. When commits are pushed to the master branch, the following happens:

1. The CI pipeline runs tests and builds the package
2. semantic-release analyzes commit messages to determine the next version number
3. A new version is automatically published to npm
4. A GitHub release is created with auto-generated release notes
5. The CHANGELOG.md file is updated

No manual version bumping or release creation is needed.

License

MIT