Gopher

One MCP server that fetches, caches, and digests context for Claude.

Gopher is three things that used to be three separate servers:

• fetch: point it at a GitHub repo and get back a clean Markdown digest: full directory tree, plus the contents of the files that actually matter. Filters out binaries, lock files, node_modules, venv, and the rest of the noise, then ranks what's left. No README? It builds one for you.
• cache: persistent memory across conversations, stored as two plain files you can read yourself: a structured context.json and an append-only diary.md.
• digest: reads a conversation transcript, extracts the facts with a local Ollama model, and merges them into the cache.

Everything runs locally over stdio. Nothing leaves your machine except GitHub API calls.

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Tools

Tool	What it does
fetch_github_repo(repo_url)	Markdown digest of a public repo, tree plus top files
read_context()	Return the whole context store as JSON
update_context(key, value)	Set a value at a dot path, e.g. projects.gopher.status
delete_context_key(key)	Delete a key by dot path
log_diary(entry, tag?)	Append a timestamped Markdown entry
read_diary(last_n?)	Read back the last N diary entries
digest_transcript(transcript_path)	Extract facts from a transcript, merge into the context store
summarize_only(transcript_path)	Same extraction and validation, returns JSON without writing anything
read_digest_log()	Full contents of the digest log

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Install

Requires Python 3.11+ and uv.

git clone https://github.com/pyarchana/gopher.git
cd gopher
uv venv
uv pip install -e ".[dev]"

The digest tools additionally need Ollama running locally with llama3.2 pulled:

ollama pull llama3.2

Fetch and cache work without it.

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Claude Desktop

Add this to claude_desktop_config.json (%APPDATA%\Claude\ on Windows, ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/ on macOS):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "gopher": {
      "command": "uv",
      "args": ["run", "--project", "/absolute/path/to/gopher", "gopher"]
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop afterwards.

For Claude Code, register it once and it is available in every session:

claude mcp add gopher --scope user -- uv run --project /absolute/path/to/gopher gopher

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Configuration

Settings come from a .env file in the project root, which the server loads on startup:

cp .env.example .env

Put your GITHUB_TOKEN there rather than in claude_desktop_config.json. The config file gets screenshotted, synced between machines and pasted into issues; .env is gitignored and stays put. Anything set in the client config still wins if you prefer that route.

Variable	Default	Purpose
GITHUB_TOKEN	none	Optional. Raises the GitHub rate limit from 60 to 5,000 requests/hour.
GOPHER_DATA_DIR	./data	Where context.json, diary.md, and digest_log.md live.
GOPHER_DIGEST_BUDGET	40000	Maximum characters a repo digest may return. Raise it if your client accepts larger tool results, lower it to save context.
GOPHER_OLLAMA_URL	http://localhost:11434/api/generate	Ollama endpoint.
GOPHER_OLLAMA_MODEL	llama3.2	Model used for fact extraction.

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Development

uv run pytest
uv run ruff check .
uv run ruff format .

CI runs all three on every push and pull request, against Python 3.11 through 3.14.

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License

MIT, see LICENSE.