A reading room that lives in your agent. MCPortal gives you a room of portals onto sources you choose: Hacker News, GitHub, YouTube channels, subreddits, Bluesky, Mastodon, documentation sites and repos, and any site with a feed. You ask your agent to arrange it, and it does. Articles and docs open in a clean reader with no ads, and your agent reads them with you.
MCPortal is an MCP server with an MCP Apps interface, so the room renders inline in the agent you already use: Claude (desktop, web and Claude Code), Codex, or any MCP host that supports apps. It's an early product; feedback from people trying it is welcome.
Watch the MCPortal tour: a reading room opens inside a chat
Watch MCPortal in 22 seconds, with sound. The same tour is on mcportal.lol.
What you can do
- Build a room by talking. Start from starter packs, then add any site, feed, channel, subreddit or repo by asking. Rearrange it in plain words: "put GitHub on the left", "make the blog wider", "show it as a river". Choose Columns, Shelves, River, Catalogue, Editorial or Paperback; your layout stays with your room.
- Read the docs you work with. Point it at a GitHub repo, a docs site or an
llms.txt, and the docs open as a book in the chat. Your agent reads the same page and answers from it. - Read, save and clip. Articles open in a reader view with figures, captions, code and tables. Continue where you left off, keep a passage, or hand it to a new chat. Save links, and clip quotes, notes, tables and images from the conversation to find again in any chat.
- Ask what's new. Your agent picks what's worth reading across everything you follow, and says why.
- Make a Space your own. Claim a handle and choose a paperback, magazine or patch, with your own cover, topics and pinned post. Public Spaces have a web page and RSS feed; you control web visibility and whether people can discover you.
- Share and follow. Follow other readers, reblog their posts with your own note, and ask your agent to find people who read what you read. Choose Public or Followers only for each post.
- Keep your data. Export everything in standard formats: OPML, bookmarks, Markdown.
Three ways to use it
| Way | What it means | Start here |
|---|---|---|
| Install the plugin | Runs on your computer. No account; your room lives in ~/.mcportal. | Install |
| Use the hosted service | Add https://mcportal.lol/mcp as a custom connector and sign in with GitHub. The same room on every device, plus sharing and following. | Hosted connector |
| Host your own | Run your own instance on Railway. | Self-host |
New here? The getting started tutorial takes you from install to a working room in a few minutes.
Want your agent to set up the hosted connection? Use the copyable setup prompt, also available in the site's Get it section. Coding agents can configure supported hosts; other agents can walk you through the settings and GitHub sign-in.
Recent additions
The latest reading features are listed below. The changelog tracks their release status; hosted and plugin availability follows deployments and releases. Check your installed version before trying them.
| Feature | What to try | Guide |
|---|---|---|
| Recall Shelf | "Find what I saved or clipped about databases." Search saved links, clip text and reading history together. | Organize reading |
| Desks, comparisons and trails | Keep related sources and notes together, compare two or three sources, or work through an ordered reading path. Collections stay private. | Organize reading |
| Finite catch-up | Choose a bounded set of unseen stories and resume it later. New arrivals wait for another session. | Catch up |
| Changes and Upcoming | Follow changes to a page or repo's releases, or dated events from a public calendar or verified artist. | Watch reading and events |
| Shop | Preview a supported Shopify store, confirm a collection or sales-only follow, and check arrivals, price drops and saved-product restocks on demand. | Follow stores |
| Automatic Space sections | Preview eligible sources and people you follow, then choose which lists signed-in visitors can see. | Customize your Space |
Documentation
The documentation index lists every page. The ones most people want:
- Getting started
- Install on each host
- Customize your Space
- Organize reading
- Watch reading and events
- Follow stores
- Tool reference
- Configuration
- Architecture
- Security model
- Roadmap
- Changelog
Contributing
MCPortal runs from a checkout with no build step. See CONTRIBUTING.md to run it locally and send changes.
Security
Report vulnerabilities as described in SECURITY.md. Please don't open public issues for them.
License
MCPortal is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0. See LICENSE.