Your First Knowledge Base

A guided walkthrough — create entries, search, connect to Claude, and see everything working together.

This walkthrough takes you from zero to a working knowledge base connected to Claude. It assumes you’ve already installed Pyrite (see Quick Start if not).

Create a knowledge base

mkdir my-brain && cd my-brain
pyrite init --name my-brain

This creates a kb.yaml file and an empty directory structure. Let’s add some content.

Add entries

Create a few entries to work with:

# A person
pyrite create --type person --title "Sarah Chen" \
  --body "Engineering lead at Acme. Considering move to consulting." \
  --tags "team,engineering"

# A decision
pyrite create --type decision --title "Switch to async standups" \
  --body "Decided 2026-03-01. Reduces meeting load by 3hrs/week." \
  --tags "process,meetings"

# A note with links
pyrite create --type note --title "Q1 Planning Notes" \
  --body "Discussed headcount with [[sarah-chen]]. Key decision: [[switch-to-async-standups]]." \
  --tags "planning,q1"

Each command creates a markdown file with YAML frontmatter. Look in the notes/, people/, and decisions/ directories to see what was generated.

Now search across your entries:

# Keyword search
pyrite search "async standups"

# Find entries by tag
pyrite search "tag:engineering"

# Semantic search (if you installed pyrite[semantic])
pyrite search "team changes" --mode=semantic

Explore connections

Pyrite tracks [[wikilinks]] automatically:

# What links to Sarah?
pyrite backlinks sarah-chen

# Get the full entry
pyrite get sarah-chen

# See a timeline of recent changes
pyrite timeline --limit=10

Connect to Claude

Add Pyrite’s MCP server to your Claude configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pyrite": {
      "command": "pyrite",
      "args": ["mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop (or Claude Code), and you can now ask Claude things like:

  • “What do I know about Sarah Chen?”
  • “Find all decisions made this quarter”
  • “Create a note summarizing our Q1 planning”
  • “What entries are linked to async standups?”

Claude will use Pyrite’s MCP tools to search, read, and create entries in your knowledge base.

Start the web UI

For a visual interface:

pyrite serve
# Visit http://localhost:8088

The web UI gives you:

  • A rich text editor with [[wikilink]] autocomplete
  • An interactive knowledge graph showing connections
  • Search with filters and facets
  • Collections for organizing entries into views

What’s in a KB?

After these steps, your knowledge base directory looks like:

my-brain/
  kb.yaml              # KB configuration and type definitions
  notes/
    q1-planning-notes.md
  people/
    sarah-chen.md
  decisions/
    switch-to-async-standups.md

Each file is plain markdown you can edit in any text editor. The YAML frontmatter stores structured fields (type, tags, links). Git tracks all changes.

The SQLite index (.pyrite/index.db) is derived — delete it and rebuild with pyrite index build. Your files are always the source of truth.

Next steps