kb

Part of Alexandrite Software Library - a set of high-quality, performant JavaScript libraries and tools for everyday use.

Overview

Knowledge base tooling for a markdown library: file and folder operations, full text search, formatting, and structured data extraction, available both as a CLI and as an MCP server. The library in a browser is the kb-srv server of asljs-kb-srv.

Markdown is the base file type. Other file types are supported for the operations that make sense for them; PDF files, for example, take part in text search and can be read through their text layer.

The operations themselves are functions of the kb library. This package is the kb command, a client of the kb-mcp server of asljs-kb-mcp. An application that wants the functions without a command line imports asljs-kb instead.

Installation

npm install asljs-kb-cli

For CLI usage in a project or a notes folder:

npx kb --library ./notes list

Usage

Create a note:

kb new notes/weekly-review --title "Weekly review" --tags team,weekly

notes/weekly-review.md

The note starts with YAML front matter and a level 1 heading:

---
title: Weekly review
created: 2026-01-02T03:04:05.000Z
tags:
  - team
  - weekly
---

# Weekly review

Find where a topic is discussed, across markdown and PDF alike:

kb search budget

handbook.pdf:1:11: Quarterly budget handbook
notes/weekly-review.md:9:5: The budget is approved.

Pull the outline out of a document:

kb extract notes/weekly-review.md --type headings --format text

# Weekly review (line 9)
## Decisions (line 13)

Serve libraries to an MCP client over stdio with kb-mcp of asljs-kb-mcp; each tool takes a project, the path of a library's kb.json or of its folder:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "kb": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["kb-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Every command works inside one library root: --library <path>, else KB_LIBRARY, else library of the nearest kb.json, else the current working directory. A path that resolves outside of it is rejected.

Further reading

• Guide - how a command reaches the library, every command and option, rendering, moving with links, backlinks, the link index, and the MCP server.
• Requirements - what the CLI guarantees, as rq requirements.

Questions and bugs: asljs/issues.

Related packages

• kb - the knowledge base functions, as a library.
• asljs-kb-mcp - the kb-mcp MCP server, and the client the CLI reaches it with.
• asljs-kb-srv - the kb-srv web server.

License

MIT License. See LICENSE for details.