Module config

Configuration for the Zotero MCP server.

Design

The server needs to know where three things live:

1. zotero.sqlite — Zotero’s main database (71MB, ~7000 refs). This is where all item metadata, collections, tags, creators, and attachments are stored. We open it read-only.

2. better-bibtex.migrated — BBT’s citekey mapping database. Contains a citationkey table mapping (itemID, itemKey) → citekey. This lets us resolve “demilloHintsTestData1978” to Zotero item key “9MS26VH5” without calling the BBT JSON-RPC API.

3. Zotero storage — directory where PDFs live, organized as storage/{2-char}/{8-char}/filename.pdf.

For write operations, we also need the Zotero Web API key and the BBT JSON-RPC URL (for BibTeX export only).

Environment variables

Same variable names as the Python server for drop-in replacement:

Variable	Default
ZOTERO_SQLITE_PATH	~/Zotero/zotero.sqlite
ZOTERO_STORAGE_PATH	~/Zotero/storage
BBT_MIGRATED_PATH	~/Zotero/better-bibtex.migrated
ZOTERO_API_KEY	(none — writes disabled)
ZOTERO_LIBRARY_ID	(none — required for writes)
ZOTERO_LIBRARY_TYPE	user
BBT_URL	http://localhost:23119/better-bibtex/json-rpc
ZOTERO_MCP_LOG	info

Structs

Config

Server configuration, loaded from environment variables.

Enums

LogLevel

Functions

env_path 🔒

load_resolver_config 🔒

Load resolver config from TOML file if present, otherwise defaults.