The simplest and most stable MCP Server for Anki

Mousetail's goal is to be the simplest and most reliable way of connecting Anki to an LLM. It does not require any addons, just have anki installed and an LLM you'd like to connect to your decks.

Running the server is as simple as:

uvx mousetail

For detailed instructions on integrating with Claude Code, Claude Desktop, and other LLM tools:

Usage Guide

API Reference

Features

• Minimal - supports core anki operations: create, read, update and delete
• Stable - works directly with anki's stable pylib api, no addons or deps
• Simple - no configuration required, automatically discovers your Anki collections

Use Cases

Selectively commit what you learn in conversation with an LLM to memory

"Create a deck based on our conversation so I don't forget critical details"

Use an LLM to interact with your deck

"Create a card - what is a coeffcient?, create a card - id the first coefficient in this polynomial"

Use an LLM to cleanup a deck

"Check my french vocab deck for correctness and correct any mistakes, typos or errors"

Important Notes

How Collections Are Accessed

The MCP server finds Anki collections at their standard locations:

• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Anki2/[Profile]/collection.anki2
• Linux: ~/.local/share/Anki2/[Profile]/collection.anki2
• Windows: %APPDATA%\Anki2\[Profile]\collection.anki2

You don't need to configure paths - the server automatically discovers available collections, this can be customized using configuration.

Configuration

The server can be customized through a config.json file. See the Usage Guide for configuration options.

Development

Core goals

Mousetail was written because all the existing MCP Anki tools depend on the AnkiConnect addon.

AnkiConnect is a HTTP server for Anki, it was originally created to support connecting browser extensions like yomichan to Anki. For MCP development, it is not necessary and introduces issues:

• introduces complexity e.g. a dedicated HTTP server for Anki occupies a port
• introduces risk e.g. if the AnkiConnect API changes or has a bug the MCP tool will break
• introduces an extra step e.g. all current MCP tools require installing the AnkiConnect addon

Mousetail has a much simpler approach. It integrates directly with Anki's pylib. This is a stable API that's part of Anki's core, it therefore is not subject to arbitrary or frequent change, and does not require any 3rd-party addons.

Because it prioritizes simplicity, mousetail will remain more stable than the alternatives. The tradeoff is that Mousetail will never integrate with the Anki UI. It is also reasonable to assume that Mousetail will only ever work with colocated (same system) LLM tools and Anki decks.

Building Documentation

The project uses Sphinx with the Furo theme to generate documentation from Python docstrings.

1. Install documentation dependencies:

   uv pip install ".[docs]"
   

2. Build the documentation:

   uv run python -m sphinx -b html docs docs/_build/html
   

3. View the documentation: Open docs/_build/html/index.html in your browser.

The documentation is automatically built and deployed to GitHub Pages on every push to the main branch.

License

MIT License - see LICENSE file for details.