GitHub Brain MCP Server

GitHub Brain is an experimental MCP server for summarizing GitHub discussions, issues, and pull requests. Answer questions like:

What are the contributions of user X in the last month?
Summarize this month's discussions.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/80910025-9d58-4367-af00-bf4c51e6ce86

GitHub Brain complements (but does not replace) the official GitHub MCP server. It stores GitHub data in a local database for:

Fast responses
More than the standard 100-item API limit
Token-efficient Markdown output

GitHub Brain is programmed in Markdown.

Installation

npm i -g github-brain

Rerun to update. sudo may be required on some systems.

Alternatively use npx to run without installing globally and needing sudo.

npx github-brain@latest

Usage

github-brain

Launches the interactive TUI where you can:

Setup - Configure authentication and settings
- Login with GitHub (OAuth) - Recommended for most users
- Login with Personal Access Token - For fine-grained tokens or when OAuth is unavailable
- Open configuration file - Edit .env directly
Pull - Populate the local database with GitHub data

Re-run pull anytime to update the database with new GitHub data.

The app loads environment variables from a .env file in the GitHub Brain's home directory - ~/.github-brain by default.

Example .env file

GITHUB_TOKEN=your_github_token
ORGANIZATION=my-org

Argument	Description
`-m`	Home directory. Default: `~/.github-brain`

Personal access token scopes

Use [fine-grained personal access tokens](https://github.com/settings/personal-access-tokens).

**Private organizations:** Token needs read access to discussions, issues, metadata, and pull requests. [Generate token](https://github.com/settings/personal-access-tokens/new?name=github-brain&description=http%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fwham%2Fgithub-brain&issues=read&pull_requests=read&discussions=read).

**Public organizations:** Any token works (data is publicly accessible).

MCP Server

Start the MCP server using the local database:

github-brain mcp

Argument	Variable	Description
`-o`	`ORGANIZATION`	GitHub organization. Required.
`-m`		Home directory. Default: `~/.github-brain`

MCP Configuration

Claude

Add to the Claude MCP configuration file:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "github-brain": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "github-brain",
      "args": ["mcp"]
    }
}

Merge with existing mcpServers if present.

VS Code

Add to the VS Code MCP configuration file:

{
  "servers": {
    "github-brain": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "github-brain",
      "args": ["mcp"],
      "version": "0.0.1"
    }
  }
}

Merge with existing servers if present.

Development

scripts/run builds and runs github-brain with the checkout directory as home -m (database in db/, config in .env).

github-brain