thedotmack-claude-mem/docs/server.md

Claude-Mem Server (Beta)

Claude-Mem Server is the beta server runtime for Claude-Mem 13. It is a Postgres-backed, BullMQ-driven, API-key-authenticated runtime that replaces the legacy claude-mem worker for deployable use cases.

Architecture

                +-------------------+
                |  Hooks / SDK / MCP|
                |    (clients)      |
                +---------+---------+
                          |  HTTPS / Bearer API key
                          v
+-----------------+  +----+---------+   +-------------------+
|    Postgres     |<-+ claude-mem-  +-->+      Valkey       |
| (canonical      |  |   server      |   | (BullMQ queue,   |
|  storage:       |  | --daemon      |   |  noeviction,     |
|  events,        |  | HTTP only,    |   |  appendonly yes) |
|  observations,  |  | no generation |   +---------+---------+
|  jobs, sessions,|  +-------+-------+             ^
|  api_keys)      |          | enqueue              | poll
+--------^--------+          |                      |
         |                   v                      |
         |          +-----------------+             |
         +----------+ claude-mem-     +-------------+
            read    |  worker (Nx)    |  consume jobs
            write   | server worker   |  call provider
                    |  start          |
                    +-----------------+

The HTTP service and the BullMQ generation worker run from the same image and same codebase, but are split into separate processes / containers so that:

1. Long-running provider calls cannot block HTTP responsiveness.
2. Generation can scale horizontally (docker compose up --scale claude-mem-worker=N).
3. Restarting the HTTP server does not lose enqueued generation work — jobs live in Valkey, persisted by AOF.

The legacy claude-mem worker runtime is not spawned in Docker. The container entrypoint runs bun server-service.cjs --daemon (or worker start) and never bun worker-service.cjs.

Required environment variables

validateServerBetaEnv() runs at startup and refuses to boot when any of the following are missing or invalid in Docker:

Variable	Required	Notes
CLAUDE_MEM_RUNTIME	Docker	Must be server-beta in Docker (warned otherwise).
CLAUDE_MEM_QUEUE_ENGINE	Docker	Must be bullmq. In-process queues are rejected in Docker.
CLAUDE_MEM_SERVER_DATABASE_URL	Always	Postgres connection string. Fails fast at startup.
CLAUDE_MEM_REDIS_URL	bullmq	Required when queue engine is bullmq.
CLAUDE_MEM_AUTH_MODE	Always	Must NOT be local-dev in Docker.
CLAUDE_MEM_ALLOW_LOCAL_DEV_BYPASS	Docker	Must NOT be 1/true in Docker.
CLAUDE_MEM_GENERATION_DISABLED	Optional	Set to true on the HTTP service when running a separate worker.
CLAUDE_MEM_SERVER_PROVIDER	Worker	One of claude, gemini, openrouter. Worker only.
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY (or alt)	Worker	Required by the chosen provider.

Local development can still use SQLite + local-dev auth bypass outside Docker only. Deployable mode must use the table above.

Generation worker mode (claude-mem server worker start)

The same image runs the generation worker via:

claude-mem server worker start

This starts a process that:

• Connects to Postgres and Valkey using the same configuration as the HTTP service.
• Attaches BullMQ Workers to the event and summary queues.
• Never opens an HTTP listener.
• Blocks in the foreground (good for docker run, kubectl run, systemd).
• Forces generation enabled even if CLAUDE_MEM_GENERATION_DISABLED=true is inherited from the shared compose file. The worker IS the generation process.

In Compose this is the claude-mem-worker service. Scale it horizontally:

docker compose up -d --scale claude-mem-worker=4

BullMQ guarantees only one worker processes a given job at a time; the provider call inside ProviderObservationGenerator.process is idempotent on the job.id (evt_<sha256> / sum_<sha256>) so retries cannot duplicate observations.

Auth in production

CLAUDE_MEM_AUTH_MODE=api-key

API keys are created with:

claude-mem server api-key create \
  --name "ci"                  \
  --scope memories:read,memories:write

The raw key is shown once; only a SHA-256 hash is stored in Postgres (api_keys.key_hash). Revoke with:

claude-mem server api-key revoke <id>

Revocation is enforced on every request because requirePostgresServerAuth reloads the row by hash on each call. There is no in-memory cache to poison.

Do not enable CLAUDE_MEM_AUTH_MODE=local-dev in Docker. The loopback bypass relies on the request originating from 127.0.0.1 on the HTTP listener, which is not a meaningful boundary inside a container. The startup validator refuses to boot with this combination and returns a non-zero exit code.

Compose stack

docker-compose.yml ships four services:

• postgres — canonical storage. Schema is bootstrapped at startup by bootstrapServerBetaPostgresSchema().
• valkey — BullMQ queue, configured with appendonly yes, appendfsync everysec, maxmemory-policy noeviction.
• claude-mem-server — HTTP runtime. CLAUDE_MEM_GENERATION_DISABLED=true so the BullMQ Worker is not attached here.
• claude-mem-worker — generation worker. Scale horizontally.

Bring it up:

docker compose up -d --build

Tear it down (and wipe data):

docker compose down -v

End-to-end test

scripts/e2e-server-docker.sh brings up the full stack and verifies:

• POST /v1/events?wait=true returns a generationJob descriptor.
• Restart of claude-mem-server and claude-mem-worker mid-stream does not lose data.
• Revoking an API key denies subsequent reads and writes (401/403).
• No worker-service.cjs process runs in any container.
• CLAUDE_MEM_AUTH_MODE=local-dev is rejected inside Docker.