barnacle-search

A local MCP server that attaches to your codebase and gives Claude semantic search, symbol extraction, and auto-reindexing — no cloud, no API keys.

• Symbol extraction — parses every file with tree-sitter and indexes classes, methods, and functions
• Semantic search — embeds your codebase with a local Ollama model so you can search by meaning, not just text
• Regex search — fast ripgrep/grep fallback for exact pattern matching
• Auto-reindex — watches for file changes and updates the index automatically
• Works offline — everything runs locally via Ollama

| Language | Extensions | |----------|-----------| | C# | .cs | | JavaScript | .js, .jsx, .mjs, .cjs | | TypeScript | .ts, .tsx | | HTML | .html, .htm | | Python | .py, .pyw | | Dart | .dart |

• Python 3.11+
• uv (installed automatically by setup scripts)
• Ollama for semantic search
• git + a C compiler (gcc or clang) for the Dart grammar

git clone https://github.com/zjs81/barnacle-search.git
cd barnacle-search
./setup.sh

git clone https://github.com/zjs81/barnacle-search.git
cd barnacle-search
.\setup.ps1

The setup script will:

1. Install uv if not already present
2. Install all Python dependencies
3. Compile the Dart tree-sitter grammar from source
4. Register barnacle-search as a global MCP server in Claude Code (~/.claude.json)

Semantic search requires a running Ollama instance with the embedding model pulled:

# macOS
brew install ollama
ollama pull qwen3-embedding:0.6b

# Windows
winget install Ollama.Ollama
ollama pull qwen3-embedding:0.6b

Barnacle will auto-pull the model if Ollama is running but the model isn't downloaded yet. Structural search (symbols, regex) works fine without Ollama.