@lbruton/claude-context

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Actively maintained fork of zilliztech/claude-context — hardened for self-hosted Milvus deployments.

Why this fork?

The upstream @zilliz/claude-context-mcp targets Zilliz Cloud. When used with self-hosted Milvus it has several issues:

No fetch/gRPC timeout — hangs indefinitely on DEADLINE_EXCEEDED
Zilliz Cloud fallback — silently falls back to cloud on any connection error, masking local Milvus failures
No retry logic — a single transient failure aborts the entire indexing run
No error differentiation — timeout vs auth vs connection failure all look the same
Carries unused packages — chrome extension, VS Code extension, and evaluation suite add attack surface without value for MCP-only deployments
Ignore file accumulation — .dockerignore, .npmignore etc. loaded alongside .gitignore, causing patterns like *.md to bleed across repos indexed in the same session

This fork strips it down to core + MCP server, patches all known issues, and publishes to @lbruton/ on npm.

Changes from upstream

Reliability (CC-1)

Removed Zilliz Cloud fallback — failed Milvus connections surface as errors immediately, no silent cloud redirect
Retry with exponential backoff — transient DEADLINE_EXCEEDED and connection errors retry automatically before failing
Health check on startup — Milvus connectivity verified at server init with a clear error if unreachable
30s fetch + gRPC timeouts — no more indefinite hangs on REST or gRPC calls
Hardened snapshot validation — safety guards prevent corrupted state files from breaking subsequent runs

Indexing correctness (CC-2 — v0.1.13)

Allowlist for ignore files — only .gitignore and .contextignore are loaded; .dockerignore, .npmignore, and other tool-specific files are excluded. Prevents patterns like *.md from a Docker ignore file bleeding into unrelated repos indexed in the same session.
Negation line filtering — !-prefixed lines in .gitignore are stripped rather than passed as positive rules to the glob engine, preventing false exclusions.

Cleaner MCP startup (CC-3 — v0.1.13)

Removed debug logs — [DEBUG] lines that dumped environment variable names (including API key presence) to stderr on every startup have been removed from config.ts.

Security hardening (v0.1.8)

Removed unused packages — chrome extension, VS Code extension, and evaluation/ benchmark suite eliminated along with their vulnerable dependency trees
Patched all dependencies — 67 audit vulnerabilities resolved (0 remaining)
pnpm overrides for transitive deps pinned by upstream packages
Codacy SCA/SAST clean — .codacy.yml configured, false positives suppressed

Scope

Rebranded to @lbruton/ npm scope — @lbruton/claude-context-core + @lbruton/claude-context-mcp
Lean monorepo — only packages/core and packages/mcp remain in the workspace

Installation (Claude Code MCP)

In ~/.claude/.mcp.json:

{
    "mcpServers": {
        "claude-context": {
            "command": "npx",
            "args": ["-y", "@lbruton/claude-context-mcp@latest"],
            "env": {
                "OPENAI_API_KEY": "sk-...",
                "EMBEDDING_PROVIDER": "OpenAI",
                "EMBEDDING_MODEL": "text-embedding-3-small",
                "MILVUS_ADDRESS": "192.168.1.81:19530"
            },
            "startupTimeoutMs": 30000
        }
    }
}

Environment Variables

| Variable | Required | Description | | -------------------- | -------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------- | | MILVUS_ADDRESS | Yes | Milvus gRPC endpoint — bare host:port (e.g., 192.168.1.81:19530) | | OPENAI_API_KEY | Yes\* | API key for OpenAI embeddings | | EMBEDDING_PROVIDER | No | OpenAI (default), VoyageAI, Gemini, Ollama | | EMBEDDING_MODEL | No | Model name (default: text-embedding-3-small) | | MILVUS_TOKEN | No | Authentication token for Milvus (if auth enabled) | | VOYAGEAI_API_KEY | No | Required when EMBEDDING_PROVIDER=VoyageAI | | GEMINI_API_KEY | No | Required when EMBEDDING_PROVIDER=Gemini | | OLLAMA_HOST | No | Ollama server host (default: http://127.0.0.1:11434) | | OLLAMA_MODEL | No | Ollama model name (alternative to EMBEDDING_MODEL for Ollama) |

\*Required when using OpenAI embeddings (default).

Custom ignore patterns

By default only .gitignore and .contextignore are loaded. To exclude files or directories from indexing without modifying your .gitignore, add a .contextignore file at the root of the codebase:

# .contextignore
dist/
*.generated.ts
secrets/

Local Milvus setup

This fork is designed for local Milvus Standalone. Run Milvus via Docker:

docker compose -f docker-compose-milvus.yml up -d

Or point MILVUS_ADDRESS at an existing Milvus instance on your network.

Building from source

pnpm install
pnpm build:core
pnpm build:mcp

Publishing

pnpm release:core
pnpm release:mcp

License

MIT — same as upstream.

Upstream

Original project by Zilliz: zilliztech/claude-context. This fork diverges in scope (MCP-only, self-hosted Milvus) but the core indexing engine and MCP protocol implementation remain theirs.

claude-context