ContextForge MCP — Persistent Memory for Claude, Cursor & Copilot

Give Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot persistent memory across sessions via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Stop re-explaining your project every time.

ContextForge MCP is an open-source MCP server that connects your AI coding assistants to long-term, searchable memory. Decisions, architecture notes, debugging context, and project knowledge stay available across every session — across every tool that supports MCP.

• 🧠 Persistent memory — your AI remembers everything across sessions, days, and weeks
• 🔍 Semantic search — find knowledge by meaning, not keywords
• 🔗 One memory, every tool — Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Claude Desktop, Windsurf
• 🐙 Git integration — sync commits and PRs automatically
• ✅ Task tracking — issues, assignments, and project status
• 👥 Team collaboration — share projects and memory with your team
• 🆓 Free tier — get started without a credit card

[!NOTE] Works automatically, no config needed (v0.5.1+). On connect, the server sends startup instructions to your AI client. Clients that honor them (Claude Desktop, Claude Code) load your project memory at the start of every session and save new decisions proactively — without you editing any settings. Running init (Step 4) is now a reinforcement, not a requirement, and still helps on clients that don't yet honor server instructions (e.g. Cursor).

---

Quick Start

1. Install

No install step needed — the setup below runs the server via npx -y contextforge-mcp, which fetches it on demand and keeps it up to date.

Prefer a global install for slightly faster cold starts? npm install -g contextforge-mcp is optional; if you do it, you can drop the npx -y prefix from the commands below.

2. Get your API key

1. Go to contextforge.dev
2. Sign up (free tier available)
3. Settings → API Keys → Generate API Key
4. Copy your key (starts with cf_)

3. Connect to your AI tool

Claude Desktop

Edit ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "contextforge": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "contextforge-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "CONTEXTFORGE_API_KEY": "your-api-key-here"
      }
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop.

Claude Code (CLI)

claude mcp add contextforge -s user \
  -e CONTEXTFORGE_API_KEY=your-api-key-here \
  -- npx -y contextforge-mcp

Restart Claude Code and run /mcp to verify it's connected.

Cursor

Add to your Cursor MCP settings:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "contextforge": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "contextforge-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "CONTEXTFORGE_API_KEY": "your-api-key-here"
      }
    }
  }
}

GitHub Copilot (VS Code)

Add to your Copilot MCP config:

{
  "servers": {
    "contextforge": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "contextforge-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "CONTEXTFORGE_API_KEY": "your-api-key-here"
      }
    }
  }
}

4. Initialize your project (recommended)

With v0.5.1+ the server auto-loads memory on supporting clients (see the note at the top), so this step is optional but recommended: it reinforces the behavior, covers clients that don't honor server instructions, and fully overrides the built-in file-based memory.

Set up your project so your AI editor always prefers ContextForge memory:

npx contextforge-mcp init

By default, init auto-detects which editor your project uses and writes three rule sections and two hooks:

• Memory rules — route memory questions to ContextForge instead of the built-in file memory
• Session Presence rules — make parallel sessions check for each other at conversation start and before big changes
• Startup Context rules — load a short project summary (overview, open tasks, live sessions) from ContextForge at the start of every conversation
• Post-compaction recall hook (Claude Code only) — a SessionStart hook with matcher compact in .claude/settings.json. When Claude Code compacts a long conversation, the hook runs npx -y contextforge-mcp recall and re-injects the session objective, memories relevant to what you are working on, your project's 10 most recent memories and pending tasks, so decisions saved in ContextForge survive the summary.
• Session objective hook (Claude Code only, 0.13.0) — a UserPromptSubmit hook that runs the generated script .claude/hooks/contextforge-objective.cjs with plain node (~50 ms). It records your prompts to ~/.contextforge-mcp/sessions/<session_id>.jsonl on your machine, so recall can put the session's objective back after a compaction. The log is pruned after 14 days and never uploaded; see the privacy note below for what recall sends.

Files written:

• CLAUDE.md for Claude Code (signals: existing CLAUDE.md or .claude/ directory)
• .cursorrules for Cursor (signals: existing .cursorrules or .cursor/ directory)
• .claude/settings.json for Claude Code — merged, never overwritten; only the two ContextForge hook groups are added
• .claude/hooks/contextforge-objective.cjs for Claude Code — the generated objective hook script (safe to commit; refreshed by init when a new version ships; Claude Code's own system turns — prompts that start with an XML-like tag and contain a closing tag — are not logged)

If no editor is detected, both files are generated.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗