Community skill: drive Open Notebook from Claude (and any MCP client)

[sergeesteves]

Hi all 👋

I put together a small open-source Agent Skill + setup guide for driving Open Notebook
from Claude Code/Desktop and other MCP clients:

👉 https://github.com/sergeesteves/open-notebook-mcp-skill (MIT)

It wraps two MCP servers:

• open-notebook-mcp (by @Epochal-dev) to pilot an instance — notebooks, sources, notes,
  chat, search, models, settings
• content-core (by @lfnovo) for standalone URL/file/text extraction & summarization

What's inside:

• One-command Claude Code install (claude mcp add …) + a Claude Desktop/VS Code JSON block
• The full tool list and a URL-extraction engine cheatsheet (Auto/Firecrawl/Jina/Crawl4AI/Simple)
• Two gotchas that cost me time and might save others some:
  • open-notebook-mcp needs the mcp SDK pinned to <2 (2.x renamed FastMCP → crashes on
    start with no tools exposed)
  • OPEN_NOTEBOOK_URL must be the root, without /api (the server adds it; otherwise
    /api/api/… → 404)

It's fully agnostic of where the instance runs and which AI providers it uses — it only needs
the URL (and a password if you've enabled protection).

One question while I'm here: would you be open to listing community MCP skills like this in the
docs (e.g. in docs/5-CONFIGURATION/mcp-integration.md)? Happy to open a PR with a one-line entry
if that's useful — totally fine if not.

Feedback very welcome, and thanks for Open Notebook — it's great 🙏

[lfnovo]

Closing our Discord thread on an official MCP server and moving the wishlist here:

• Opt-in only, disabled by default, with token auth on the API for MCP clients.
• Most wanted actions: search, add sources and notebooks from a chat client, fire questions at a notebook, trigger podcasts.
• Add a source without a notebook, using Sources as a read-later inbox.
• Use Open Notebook as a private store for chats from other assistants, accessible back via MCP.
• Works with Obsidian Smart Composer already, confirmed by a user.
• Split opinion on priority: some would rank it below citations and UX.

The Discord forum where this was discussed is now retired in favor of Discussions.