🔍 gitlog-mcp

Give your AI coding agent superpowers over git history.

gitlog-mcp is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that lets AI agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, and any MCP client) understand what changed in a repository — auto-generate changelogs, analyze commits, attribute blame, and draft release notes.

"What changed in this repo?" is the question every AI agent gets wrong. This fixes it.

<p align="center"> <img src="public/gitlog-mcp.gif" alt="gitlog-mcp demo" width="720"> </p>

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Why this exists

AI coding agents are great at writing code but famously bad at knowing the history of a codebase. They hallucinate changelogs, misattribute blame, and guess at release notes. gitlog-mcp gives them a reliable, structured window into git log — so their answers are grounded in what actually happened, not invented.

Features

• 📝 Auto-changelog — generate a clean, grouped changelog from any tag/commit range
• 🔎 Commit analysis — explain why a change happened, not just what changed
• 👤 Blame attribution — who touched what, and when (with context)
• 🏷️ Release notes — draft release notes from tag-to-tag diffs
• 📊 Repo health — commit frequency, top contributors, churn hotspots
• 🧱 Zero runtime dependencies — pure Python stdlib + the MCP SDK, one file

Quick start

# 1. Install from PyPI
pip install gitlog-mcp

# 2. Run standalone (for testing) — defaults to the current directory
gitlog-mcp
gitlog-mcp --repo /path/to/your/repo

# 3. Or add directly to your agent's MCP config (see below)

Want the local web dashboard too? It's an optional extra, not installed by default: pip install "gitlog-mcp[ui]". Plain pip install gitlog-mcp stays exactly as dependency-free as ever.

Installing from source (for contributors): git clone https://github.com/ManiaSacha/gitlog-mcp.git && cd gitlog-mcp && pip install -e . — see CONTRIBUTING.md for details.

Claude Code config

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "gitlog": {
      "command": "gitlog-mcp",
      "args": ["--repo", "."]
    }
  }
}

Cursor config (.cursor/mcp.json)

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "gitlog": {
      "command": "gitlog-mcp",
      "args": ["--repo", "."]
    }
  }
}

Windsurf config

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "gitlog": {
      "command": "gitlog-mcp",
      "args": ["--repo", "."]
    }
  }
}

Debug it standalone

Want to poke at the tools directly before wiring up an agent? The MCP Inspector gives you a UI to call each tool by hand:

npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector gitlog-mcp --repo .

Example agent prompts

"Generate a changelog of everything that changed between v1.2.0 and v1.3.0."

"Who introduced this buggy line in src/parser.py and why?"

"Draft release notes for the next version based on recent commits."

Tools exposed

Tool	Description
changelog	Grouped changelog for a commit/tag range
analyze_commit	Explain a specific commit's intent and impact
blame_file	Line-level attribution for a file
release_notes	Draft release notes between two tags
repo_health	Contributor + churn summary
search_commits	Find commits by message/author/date

Web dashboard (optional)

Prefer a browser to a terminal? gitlog-mcp-ui serves a small local dashboard on top of the same git-reading code the MCP tools use — same data, human-readable.

pip install "gitlog-mcp[ui]"
gitlog-mcp-ui --repo /path/to/repo

This prints a URL (http://127.0.0.1:8765 by default) — open it in your browser; it won't open one for you.

View	What it shows
Changelog	Commit range picker (since / until)
Repo Health	Contributor stats, commit totals
Blame	Per-file, per-line attribution

Read-only — no write actions anywhere. Local-only by construction: binds to 127.0.0.1 only (there's no --host flag, so it can't be exposed to the network even by accident), and validates every request's Host header too, closing the DNS-rebinding gap a loopback bind alone doesn't cover. No auth needed, because nothing but your own machine can reach it.

It's an optional extra (pip install gitlog-mcp[ui]), not installed by default. The core gitlog-mcp server has zero runtime dependencies beyond the MCP SDK, full stop — the dashboard doesn't change that. It's http.server from the stdlib, no framework, no extra deps of its own.

Architecture

gitlog-mcp (single file, ~300 lines)
├── FastMCP server (stdio transport)
├── GitRunner — thin wrapper over `git` CLI
└── Tools — each maps to a git subcommand + parsing

Deliberately small. You can read the whole thing in an afternoon — that's a feature.

Contributing

PRs welcome. Small, focused, well-tested changes only. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Release process and versioning are documented in RELEASING.md.

Roadmap

• [x] --repo auto-detection from cwd
• [ ] Structured JSON output for all tools
• [ ] GitHub/GitLab remote integration
• [x] Tests + CI badge

License

MIT © 2026 — built in the open, for the open-source community.

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Star this repo if you want AI agents to stop hallucinating your changelog. ⭐