What is linkwarden-mcp?

Linkwarden is a self-hosted bookmark manager whose defining feature is that it does not just store a URL: when you save a page, it keeps a copy — as readable article text, as a PDF, as a screenshot, and as a single-file HTML archive. Your bookmarks survive the pages they point at.

linkwarden-mcp is a Model Context Protocol server that puts that collection in reach of an assistant. It exposes 28 tools over stdio: 11 that read and 17 that write.

What it is good at

Answering from what you already saved. get_link_content returns the article text Linkwarden extracted when it preserved the page. An assistant can summarise, compare or quote a bookmark from months ago without going back to the live web — which matters most exactly when the original has changed, moved behind a paywall, or disappeared.

Keeping the collection tidy. Creating links, moving them between collections, renaming and merging tags, bulk-tagging a batch of search results.

Not being a foot-gun. The parts that are easy to get wrong are handled explicitly: partial updates merge rather than replace, output is an allowlist rather than a dump of Linkwarden's database rows, and anything destructive needs a confirmation token bound to the exact target.

What it deliberately does not do

• Access-token management. A tool that can mint API credentials is a privilege-escalation surface.
• User administration, including account deletion.
• Backup export and import. The export dumps the whole instance into the model's context; the import can destroy it.
• Highlights. Creating one needs exact character offsets into the preserved document, which a model cannot produce meaningfully, and Linkwarden has no route to list existing ones.
• Archive uploads and the signed preserved URLs, which need NEXT_PUBLIC_USER_CONTENT_DOMAIN configured.

A note on the source of truth

Linkwarden's published API reference is incomplete. This server was written against the routes in apps/web/pages/api/v1/** and the request schemas in packages/lib/schemaValidation.ts of linkwarden/linkwarden, verified against v2.16.0. Where the two disagree, the code wins — and the surprises that came out of that reading are documented in Security and the FAQ, because they change what a caller should expect.

Next

• Getting started — token, install, first call
• Connecting clients — Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, Docker
• Tool reference — all 28 tools