BookStack MCP Server

Connect BookStack to Claude and other AI assistants through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). This server exposes 56 tools and 11 resources covering the supported subset of the BookStack API — books, pages, chapters, shelves, search, users, roles, permissions, attachments, images, the recycle bin, the audit log and system info.

This server supports two transport modes: Streamable HTTP (default) and Stdio.

• Streamable HTTP (default): A stateless HTTP transport. Authentication parameters can be overridden per-request using HTTP headers (x-bookstack-url and x-bookstack-token).

• Stdio Mode: Standard input/output for local integration (e.g., with Claude Desktop). Set MCP_TRANSPORT=stdio to enable.

⚠️ Looking for the HTTP endpoint? The MCP endpoint is POST /message — not /. See Transports and HTTP endpoints below.

✨ What You Get

• BookStack Integration - Access your books, pages, chapters, and content

• 56 MCP Tools & 11 Resources - CRUD, search and export across the supported endpoint families

• Search & Export - Find content and export in multiple formats

• User Management - Handle users, roles, and permissions

• Production Ready - Rate limiting, validation, error handling, and logging

Related MCP server: BookStack MCP Server

🚀 Quick Start

⚠️ Requires Bun 1.1.0 or newer. Node.js is not supported. This package ships TypeScript source rather than a compiled bundle, and its executable starts with #!/usr/bin/env bun — Bun must be installed on the machine that runs it. npx/npm install -g will not work.

Configure first — the default HTTP transport refuses to start until both tokens below are set:

# 1. Configure
export BOOKSTACK_BASE_URL="https://your-bookstack.com/api"
export BOOKSTACK_API_TOKEN="token_id:token_secret"   # OUTBOUND: the credential this server spends
export MCP_AUTH_TOKEN="$(openssl rand -hex 32)"      # INBOUND: who may make it spend that credential

# 2. Run without installing (starts the HTTP server on port 3000)
bunx bookstack-mcp-server

# Or install globally, then run it by name
bun add -g bookstack-mcp-server
bookstack-mcp-server

The two tokens are not interchangeable and must not be set to the same value: BOOKSTACK_API_TOKEN is what the server presents to BookStack; MCP_AUTH_TOKEN is what callers must present to POST /message, which dispatches all 56 tools with the authority of the BookStack account behind BOOKSTACK_API_TOKEN. Skip MCP_AUTH_TOKEN only for stdio, which has no network surface and ignores it.

Check it started:

curl http://localhost:3000/          # => {"status":"running", ...}
curl -i http://localhost:3000/health # => 200 healthy, or 503 if BookStack is unreachable

Add to Claude

To use with Claude Desktop (requires Stdio mode):

# For Claude Code
claude mcp add bookstack bunx bookstack-mcp-server \
  --env BOOKSTACK_BASE_URL=https://your-bookstack.com/api \
  --env BOOKSTACK_API_TOKEN=token_id:token_secret \
  --env MCP_TRANSPORT=stdio

Configuration

Set these environment variables:

export BOOKSTACK_BASE_URL="https://your-bookstack.com/api"
export BOOKSTACK_API_TOKEN="token_id:token_secret"

# Required for the HTTP transport (the default); ignored by stdio.
export MCP_AUTH_TOKEN="$(openssl rand -hex 32)"

# Optional: transport mode — "http" (default) or "stdio"
export MCP_TRANSPORT="http"

💡 Token Format: Combine your BookStack Token ID and Token Secret as token_id:token_secret

Environment variables

💡 Need detailed setup? See the complete Setup Guide

🔌 Transports

The transport is chosen at startup from MCP_TRANSPORT:

Stdio is opt-in. If you do not set MCP_TRANSPORT=stdio, you get the HTTP server.

HTTP endpoints

When running in HTTP mode the server exposes exactly three endpoints. Any other path returns a JSON 404 listing the valid ones.

GET / and GET /health are unauthenticated. POST /message requires an inbound Authorization: Bearer <secret> header — it dispatches every tool, including permanent-delete and user/role operations, so the HTTP transport refuses to start without a secret configured. The startup error names the exact variable to set; the stdio transport has no network surface and needs none.

Check the server is up:

curl http://localhost:3000/

{
  "name": "bookstack-mcp-server",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "status": "running",
  "mcp": true,
  "endpoints": {
    "health": "/health",
    "message": "/message (POST, requires an Authorization: Bearer header)"
  },
  "documentation": "Send MCP protocol messages to POST /message"
}

Check health:

curl -i http://localhost:3000/health

/health verifies live connectivity to BookStack, so a wrong token returns 503 with the failing check named:

{
  "status": "unhealthy",
  "checks": [
    { "name": "bookstack_connection", "healthy": false, "message": "BookStack API connection" },
    { "name": "tools_loaded", "healthy": true, "message": "56 tools loaded" },
    { "name": "resources_loaded", "healthy": true, "message": "11 resources loaded" }
  ]
}

⚠️ A missing BOOKSTACK_API_TOKEN behaves differently: config validation rejects an empty token at startup, so the process exits with Configuration validation failed: bookstack.apiToken: BookStack API token is required before Express ever listens. There is no /health to call — curl gets a connection refused, and under Docker the container restart-loops. A 503 therefore always means the token is present but not working; a dead port means it is absent.

Call the MCP endpoint — an initialize handshake. Both the Content-Type and Accept headers are required by the Streamable HTTP transport, and Authorization carries the same MCP_AUTH_TOKEN you exported in the quick start:

# Fail fast rather than sending an empty bearer header and puzzling over a 401.
: "${MCP_AUTH_TOKEN:?export MCP_AUTH_TOKEN first — the inbound secret this server was started with}"

curl -X POST http://localhost:3000/message \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Accept: application/json, text/event-stream" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $MCP_AUTH_TOKEN" \
  -d '{
    "jsonrpc": "2.0",
    "id": 1,
    "method": "initialize",
    "params": {
      "protocolVersion": "2024-11-05",
      "capabilities": {},
      "clientInfo": { "name": "curl", "version": "1.0.0" }
    }
  }'

Per-request credential overrides are supported on POST /message via the x-bookstack-url and x-bookstack-token headers; both fall back to the BOOKSTACK_BASE_URL / BOOKSTACK_API_TOKEN environment variables.

Using with n8n

Point n8n's MCP client at the /message path — not the root URL:

http://<host>:3000/message

Use the host as n8n sees it: http://localhost:3000/message when n8n runs on the same machine, or the container/service name (e.g. http://mcp:3000/message) when both run in Docker on a shared network.

Running stdio in Docker

A stdio MCP server reads requests from stdin — so docker run without -i gives it no stdin, stdin hits EOF immediately, and the container exits on startup. Pass -i to keep stdin attached:

docker run -i --rm \
  -e MCP_TRANSPORT=stdio \
  -e BOOKSTACK_BASE_URL=https://your-bookstack.com/api \
  -e BOOKSTACK_API_TOKEN=token_id:token_secret \
  bookstack-mcp-server

Use -i alone, not -it: allocating a TTY breaks the JSON-RPC stream that MCP clients pipe over stdin/stdout. For stdio you also don't need -p 3000:3000 — nothing listens on a port in stdio mode.

If your container "starts then dies immediately" with MCP_TRANSPORT=stdio, a missing -i is almost always the cause.

🛠️ Available Tools

56 tools across 13 categories:

• 📚 Books (6) - Create, read, update, delete, and export books

• 📄 Pages (6) - Manage pages with HTML/Markdown content

• 📑 Chapters (6) - Organize pages within books

• 📚 Shelves (5) - Group books into collections

• 🔍 Search (1) - Search across content types

• 👥 Users (5) - User account management

• 🎭 Roles (5) - Roles and their permissions

• ⚙️ System (2) - Instance info and the audit log

• 🔐 Permissions (2) - Content access control

• 🗑️ Recycle Bin (3) - Deleted item recovery

• 📎 Attachments (5) - File attachments

• 🖼️ Images (5) - Image gallery

• 🧭 Meta (5) - Ask the server about its own tools and conventions

Not exposed (no tools): comments, imports, tag-name listings, the image-gallery data endpoints, and zip export.

📖 See the complete Tools Overview for detailed documentation

📚 Documentation

Find comprehensive guides in the docs/ folder:

• Setup Guide - Complete installation and configuration

• API Reference - Supported tools/endpoints with examples

• Tools Overview - Every tool explained

• Resources Guide - Resource access patterns

• Examples & Workflows - Real-world usage

• Integration Testing - Running the live suite against a real BookStack

• Releasing - How versions are cut and published

⚡ Quick Examples

List all books:

bookstack_books_list({ count: 10, sort: "updated_at" })

Create a new page:

bookstack_pages_create({
  name: "Getting Started",
  book_id: 1,
  markdown: "# Welcome\nYour content here..."
})

Search for content:

bookstack_search({ query: "API documentation", count: 20 })

🛠️ Development

This project is Bun-native — Bun runs the TypeScript source directly, so there is no compile step.

git clone <repository-url>
cd bookstack-mcp-server
bun install
bun run dev          # hot reload; equivalent to: bun --watch src/server.ts

bun run src/server.ts   # start the server
bun test                # run tests
bun run typecheck       # tsc --noEmit
bun run lint            # biome check .

🔧 See the Setup Guide for development, Docker, and production deployment

🐳 Local testing with Docker Compose

The included docker-compose.yml spins up a full local stack — MariaDB, a real BookStack instance, and this MCP server (built from the Bun Dockerfile).

1. Start the backing services:

   docker compose up -d db bookstack

2. Wait for BookStack to finish first-boot migrations, then open http://localhost:6875. Default linuxserver credentials:

   • Email: admin@admin.com

   • Password: password

3. Create an API token in the UI (Edit Profile → API Tokens → Create Token). Combine the Token ID and Token Secret as token_id:token_secret and put it in a .env file next to docker-compose.yml, together with an inbound secret of your own:

   echo "BOOKSTACK_API_TOKEN=token_id:token_secret" > .env
   echo "MCP_AUTH_TOKEN=$(openssl rand -hex 32)" >> .env

   The token can only be created after BookStack is running, so it cannot be baked into the image — this manual step is required once.

   Both entries are required. docker-compose.yml passes MCP_AUTH_TOKEN through to the mcp service, and the HTTP transport refuses to start without it, so a .env carrying only BOOKSTACK_API_TOKEN leaves the container in a restart loop.

4. Start the MCP server (it reads both tokens from .env):

   docker compose up -d mcp

5. Check health — returns 200 with {"status":"healthy"} once the server can reach BookStack with your token:

   curl http://localhost:3000/health

Until a valid BOOKSTACK_API_TOKEN is supplied the mcp container reports unhealthy, because /health verifies live connectivity to BookStack. If either token is missing entirely the container does not get that far and restart-loops instead of answering 503 — check docker compose logs mcp for Configuration validation failed (no BOOKSTACK_API_TOKEN) or MCP_AUTH_TOKEN is not set (no inbound secret).

The compose file pins BookStack to lscr.io/linuxserver/bookstack:version-v26.05.2 — the release this repo's tool contract was verified against — and ships a throwaway dev APP_KEY. Generate your own for anything beyond local testing, using the same pinned tag:

docker run --rm --entrypoint /bin/bash lscr.io/linuxserver/bookstack:version-v26.05.2 appkey

It prints one base64:… line to paste into APP_KEY. The --entrypoint override is required: without it the image runs its normal init first, which halts with The application key is missing, halting init! — the very key you are trying to generate — and never reaches the appkey script.

📝 License

MIT License - see LICENSE file for details.

🌟 Community

This project is part of the BookStack ecosystem! Check out other API-based tools and scripts in the BookStack API Scripts repository.

🆘 Support

• 📚 Documentation: Complete guides in the docs/ folder

• 🐛 Issues: GitHub Issues

• 💬 Discussions: GitHub Discussions

Built with ❤️ for the BookStack community