Edi Life OS is a self-hosted life dashboard with a built-in MCP server

A developer has posted Edi Life OS to Hacker News: a self-hosted dashboard that pulls habits, goals, tasks, finances and focus tracking into a single application. The unusual part for a personal productivity tool is that it ships with a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, letting an AI assistant read the dashboard and act on it — logging habits, creating goals, recording expenses — on the owner's behalf.

One dashboard, ten workspaces

According to the project's GitHub documentation, Edi Life OS replaces the familiar sprawl of a to-do app, habit tracker, budgeting spreadsheet, Pomodoro timer and notes app with ten workspaces that share one sign-in and one database: an Overview with a daily productivity score, Growth (life dimensions tied to SMART goals), Focus (Pomodoro sessions with a soundtrack), Finance, Habittify (habits and streaks), Kanban, Calendar, Goals, Notepad and Notes. The workspaces are linked rather than siloed: habit completion can feed goal progress, and Kanban cards surface in the calendar.

The stack is deliberately modest — PHP 8.1+ with MySQL 8 or MariaDB 10.4, plus vanilla JavaScript with no frontend build step or framework. It runs under Docker, via PHP's built-in server, or on cheap shared hosting, with no subscription. The project is MIT-licensed. A few defaults hint at the developer's context: money is tracked in Toman, dates follow Asia/Tehran, and the weather card reports Qeshm Island via Open-Meteo.

The MCP server is the notable part

The optional MCP server, which requires Node.js 22.9+, exposes 26 tools covering the dashboard, goals, tasks, habits, finances and notes. It runs over stdio with no hosted endpoint, and the documentation describes connecting it to Claude Desktop, Claude Code or any other MCP client. Example requests include asking an assistant to show the dashboard, create a SMART goal with a task attached, mark a habit complete for the day, or log an expense and report the balance.

Importantly, the MCP layer never touches the database or credentials directly. It communicates only through the app's token-protected HTTP API at /api/v1, which uses a bearer token separate from the browser sign-in. Agent access therefore flows through the same surface as any other API client, rather than through a privileged back door.

Security trade-offs the docs acknowledge

The documentation is candid about limitations. The app is built for a single owner, and the API token grants read and write access across every supported domain — token scopes are not implemented, nor is application-level rate limiting, so the docs recommend enforcing request limits at the hosting layer. Secret notes are hidden from API reads by default, but that flag controls visibility rather than providing separate encryption. On the integrity side, saves use revision checks so a stale browser tab cannot silently overwrite newer changes, and API writes use transactions and row locks.

Why it matters

MCP began as plumbing for AI coding assistants, and projects like this show the pattern spreading into ordinary personal software. For self-hosters, the appeal is obvious: an assistant that can act on your habits, goals and spending while the data stays in your own MySQL database rather than a third-party cloud.

The flip side is trust. Wiring Claude or any MCP client into this dashboard hands it full read/write access to an unusually complete picture of one person's life, with no scoped permissions to limit the damage of a bad request or a confused agent. Edi Life OS is a small, single-maintainer project, but it captures a clear direction: personal tools are growing agent interfaces faster than permission models are growing granular. As this becomes the default architecture for self-hosted apps, expect scoping, audit logs and per-tool access rules to move from nice-to-have to essential.