Monica Server Stack¶
Self-hosted Monica 4 with an MCP server, in one Docker Compose project.
Monica is a personal CRM: contacts, notes, activities, reminders, gifts, debts and a journal. This stack runs it on a server together with monica-mcp, so any MCP client can read and update it over HTTP.
What runs¶
| Service | |
|---|---|
monica |
Monica 4.1.2, the classic version's latest release (pinned) |
monica-cron |
Monica's scheduler, which sends reminders |
monica-db |
MariaDB 11.4 |
monica-setup |
Runs once on each start: creates the first account and the MCP server's API token, and renews the token before it expires |
monica-mcp |
14 tools for contacts, notes, activities, reminders and more, over Streamable HTTP with a bearer token (OAuth optional) |
caddy, tailscale or cloudflared |
Optional HTTPS: Monica at the domain's root, the MCP server at /mcp |
Handled automatically: the first account, the MCP server's API token (created, and renewed before its one-year expiry), the reminder scheduler, and an API rate limit high enough for AI clients (Monica's default is 60 requests a minute).
Two ways to set it up¶
Both give the same compose project, so either can be managed with monica-stack or plain docker compose afterwards.
| Installer | Docker Compose | |
|---|---|---|
| Setup | ./install.sh asks a few questions |
.env filled in by hand, then docker compose up -d |
| Secrets | Generated | Generated with the commands in .env.example |
| HTTPS, email | Asked for | Set in .env |
| Suits | Most setups | Servers where everything is a compose file |
It's light: Monica, its scheduler, the database and the MCP server idle at about 130 MB of RAM together. The images are about 1.7 GB on disk, most of it Monica's.
Versions¶
Monica stays on 4.1.2 until a pin in compose.yml changes. Monica 5 is a separate rewrite, still in beta, with a different API; monica-mcp targets Monica 4. Renovate proposes new versions of the pinned images and of monica-mcp, and each is tested by the end-to-end test before it's merged.