RedNote

RedNote MCP provides a command-line interface to access Xiaohongshu notes through an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server. It supports authentication management with cookie persistence, keyword-based note search, and note retrieval via URL. The server is designed to run in stdio mode so tools like Cursor can communicate with it, enabling automated querying and data extraction. To start using it, you first initialize login which stores authentication cookies locally, and then you can configure Cursor to talk to the MCP server by specifying the RedNote MCP entry under mcpServers with the appropriate command and arguments. The available capabilities focus on searching notes by keywords and retrieving note content via direct URLs; note that accessing comments via URL is listed as a to-do feature in the project roadmap. If you prefer not to install the binary globally, you can invoke it via npx as shown in the configuration example, which keeps things self-contained per project.

Usage flow:

• Run the initialization step to log in and save cookies to ~/.mcp/rednote/cookies.json.
• Start or connect the MCP server using the configured command (for example via Cursor) with the --stdio flag so Cursor can communicate.
• Use search and URL-based note retrieval through the MCP commands exposed by the rednote-mcp tooling to fetch content you need.

Prerequisites:

• Node.js >= 16
• npm >= 7
• Access to the internet to install dependencies from npm registry

Install from NPM (global or per-project):

1. Global install (optional, convenient for CLI):

npm install -g rednote-mcp

2. Local install (in project):

npm install

Initialization and usage:

• Initialize login (will open a browser to authenticate and save cookies):

rednote-mcp init

• Start the MCP server via npm script or npx (as shown in the configuration):

# Using npx (no global install required)
npx rednote-mcp --stdio

• If you cloned the repository and want to run directly from source for development:

# From repository root
npm install
npm run dev -- init

Build / development (optional for source usage):

npm run build
npm run dev

Testing (if applicable):

npm test

Tips and notes:

• The login cookies are stored at ~/.mcp/rednote/cookies.json. Treat this file as sensitive information.
• Ensure Node.js is properly installed and available in your PATH.
• The MCP server communicates over stdio; ensure the consuming tool (e.g., Cursor) is configured to use --stdio as shown in the example configuration.
• If you encounter authentication issues, re-run rednote-mcp init to refresh cookies.
• The current feature set includes authentication management, keyword search, and URL-based note access. Access to comments via URL is not yet implemented according to the README.
• When using npx, you don’t need a global installation; npx will fetch the package version from npm on demand.