A privacy-first tool to install mcp servers and background agents for your personal data
Toolbox is a cli tool for installing and managing MCP servers and background agents, made for developers.
Toolbox is currently in beta and macOS only
- Toolbox supports popular developer tools (think github, slack, discord, obsidian, gmail etc.), and clients (claude desktop, cursor), making it easier to deploy useful MCP servers without having them managed by a specific client
- With toolbox you can install mcp servers with background agents and their dependencies using
tb install <appname> - background agents download your data or index it (OCR/transcription/embeddings for RAG); you can choose between fully local or free hosted in openmined enclaves
- 🧠🔎 Customizable, Custom Topic Tracking (Discord, Whatsapp, Github, Slack) Follow technical topics across multiple Discord servers (or other sources) with periodic, fully customizable summaries. Tailor what you want to see using simple prompt files — get only the updates that matter, automatically and efficiently. (video)
- 📋⚡ One-Command Ticket Creation (Obsidian, Github) — Turn your Obsidian TODOs into GitHub issues with a single command: no copy-pasting, no clicking, just seamless ticket creation directly from your notes.
- 🔔✨ LLM-driven custom notifications (Slack, Discord, Whatsapp) Use simple prompts or code to write instructions to decide when a message deserves a reminder (forgot to respond, missed a todo, etc)
- 📊🪄 Organize your communication for Projects or Campaigns (Slack, Discord, Google Sheets, Google Calendar) Log every person you’ve reached out to around a certain topic into a Google Sheet, complete with date, calendar events and status (video)
Before installing toolbox, make sure you have the following:
To install toolbox on your machine from PyPI, you can use uv tool:
uv tool install --prerelease allow --python 3.12 -U syft-toolbox
# to verify installation
tb info
Alternatively, you can install toolbox from source, using uv:
git clone https://github.com/OpenMined/toolbox.git
cd toolbox
uv pip install -e .
For CLang issues during installation please run
uv python install --reinstall
You can also try, if #include <string> fails
CXXFLAGS="-isystem $(xcrun --show-sdk-path)/usr/include/c++/v1" uv pip install -e .
tb install slack-mcp
To show apps in store
tb list-store
To list installed apps
tb list
To install a new app
tb install <app_name>
To show an installed app
tb show <appname>
To get logs for a local app (to follow add -f)
tb log <appname>
All mcp servers support claude desktop and claude-code, cursor support is coming soon.
| Name | Default Deployment | Read/Write Access | Install |
|---|---|---|---|
| slack-mcp | proxy-to-local | Slack Messages | tb install slack-mcp |
| discord-mcp | proxy-to-local | Discord Messages | tb install discord-mcp |
| obsidian-mcp | proxy-to-local | Obsidian notes | tb install obsidian-mcp |
| github-mcp | stdio | Issues, PRs, Settings | tb install github-mcp |
| whatsapp-desktop-mcp | proxy-to-local | WhatsApp Messages | tb install whatsapp-desktop-mcp |
| pdf-mcp | proxy-to-local | Local Documents | tb install pdf-mcp |
| google-sheets-mcp | stdio | Google sheets | tb install google-sheets-mcp |
| meeting-notes-mcp | proxy-to-local | Apple Audio Recordings, meeting notes | tb install meeting-notes-mcp |
Toolbox can run scripts on a schedule to automate tasks in your MCP pipeline. See the triggers documentation for setup and usage instructions.
Send notifications from your triggers and MCP servers using ntfy.sh. See the notifications documentation for configuration and usage.
If you dont seen audio recordings under tb show meeting-notes-mcp. The following things may help
- make sure you gave screenpipe the right permissions for recording video and audio in under Privacy and security (screenpipe should automatically request this).
- Also make sure you select the right audio device by clicking -> person icon in the right top -> settings -> recording -> audio devices -> and then select the right one.
- By default screenpipe uses local trancription, which we are not using because it might be heavy on your laptop. However, screenpipe will still try to download the model, which may block transcription. To prevent this, choose a small model like
whisper-tiny-quantizedunder -> person icon in the right top -> settings -> recording -> audio-transcription-model
We collect anonymous analytics to understand how the cli is used. The data we track includes:
- Command usage: Which CLI commands are run (install, list, list-store, reset)
- Command parameters: Non-sensitive command arguments (app names, flags like --use-local-deployments)
- Toolbox version: The version of toolbox being used
- Error information: If commands fail, we log the error type and message for debugging
- Anonymous user ID: A randomly generated UUID stored locally to understand usage patterns across multiple CLI commands
To opt out, run tb setup and disable analytics.
we provide the option to run some of these agents/mcp server in the cloud for free, with the medium term vision of deploying those components in trusted execution environments. The first beta versions wont have trusted execution environments, but we wont store any sensitive user data (only meta data). In the long term we plan to make these available at break-even cost (OpenMined is non-profit so we wont make money)