What it is
A retrieval server over an Infino catalog, which can sit in a local directory, in your own S3 or Azure bucket, or on hosted Infino Cloud. Five retrieval styles sit side by side — BM25, vector similarity, a fused hybrid ranking, unranked filters and full SQL — and each tool says when to reach for it instead of the others.
Requirements
Node.js and an MCP client that launches a stdio server; the package is @infino-ai/mcp-server on npm, usually run through npx. INFINO_MCP_URI points at the data — a local path, an s3:// or az:// bucket, or a hosted https endpoint, which additionally needs INFINO_API_KEY. Cloud credentials come from the standard provider variables rather than any of its own, so ambient IAM or managed identity works. INFINO_MCP_ENABLE_WRITES turns on infino_add_documents and lets SQL write. The first run downloads the local embedding model, about 90 MB, once. INFINO_MCP_EMBED_MODEL must match the model that produced a table's stored vectors — a mismatch gives meaningless similarity or a dimension error, while keyword and SQL search are unaffected. INFINO_MCP_VALIDATE probes the store at startup so bad credentials fail then rather than on the first search.
Setup effort
One command — claude mcp add infino --scope user -e INFINO_MCP_URI=/Users/<YOUR_USERNAME>/.infino/memory -- npx -y @infino-ai/mcp-server