Mahonia

A gear-list and pack-weight tracker for hikers. Make a packing list, see what it weighs, share it.

Lists need no sign-up: one is yours the moment you start typing, held by a private unguessable link. The gear vault is the one part that asks for an account, because "the gear I own" has to follow you across devices rather than living in one browser.

What it does

• Weigh a pack. Base, worn and consumable totals, with the worn split (three pairs of socks, one on your feet) and a carried figure. Weights are optional — a list with none keeps its totals quiet.
• A curated gear catalog behind the autocomplete, cited and correctable, with every value overridable per row.
• Per-row units. Type 32.5 oz on a gram list and that row keeps ounces while the total stays in grams.
• Calories on consumables, totalled for the list.
• Trip dates, as calendar dates — no time, no timezone, so a trip doesn't shift when you fly.
• Share two ways: a read-only link, and an edit link for co-planning. Either can be replaced if it gets out.
• Packing mode — the same list as a checklist, for the night before.
• A gear vault that fills itself as you build, so your kit is one pick away next time.
• Import from LighterPack (share link or CSV) or a JSON backup; export as CSV, JSON or Markdown.
• Recovery points, so an accidental delete is undoable well after the toast.

Run locally

Requires Node 24 (the pinned version — see .nvmrc).

npm install
npm run seed   # load the gear catalog into a local database
npm run dev    # http://localhost:3000

With no environment variables set, the app runs fully on your machine against a local PGlite database. Copy .env.example to .env to point at a real Postgres (Neon) and Redis (Upstash) for a production deploy.

Anything that would leave the machine degrades to the console instead of being skipped, so a fresh checkout is a working app rather than a broken one:

Both fail loudly in production rather than quietly accepting input that goes nowhere.

Stack

Nuxt 4 · Vue 3 · TypeScript · Drizzle ORM · deployed on Vercel.

MCP connector

The app serves a remote MCP server at /mcp, so an AI assistant can be handed https://mahonia.app/mcp as a connector with nothing to install and no sign-in. Seven tools: read a shared list as data or Markdown, search the catalog, fetch one product's variants, and, holding an edit link, make a list, add rows and set the trip's dates and trail. A share code is the read capability and the edit link's fragment token the write one, hashed on arrival and passed only as a tool argument, so nothing new is trusted. The transport is stateless JSON-RPC over POST (MCP revisions 2025-06-18 and 2025-11-25, no sessions, no event stream, GET answers 405), hand-rolled in server/routes/mcp.post.ts with the tools in server/utils/mcp.ts; both files carry the reasoning. My Gear is deliberately out of reach: it would need an account token, which is a separate decision.

Add it to a client:

• Claude (claude.ai, Desktop, mobile): add Mahonia as a connector and choose "No sign-in". Connectors added there are available in Claude Code too.
• Claude Code: claude mcp add --transport http --scope user mahonia https://mahonia.app/mcp
• Gemini CLI: gemini mcp add --transport http mahonia https://mahonia.app/mcp
• ChatGPT: Settings, Developer mode, add https://mahonia.app/mcp with "No Authentication".
• Anything that reads an mcp.json: {"mcpServers":{"mahonia":{"url":"https://mahonia.app/mcp"}}}
• A client that only speaks stdio: bridge with npx mcp-remote https://mahonia.app/mcp.

The server is listed in the official MCP registry as app.mahonia/mahonia; server.json is the listing, published with mcp-publisher under the domain's DNS proof.

Changelog

The changelog is GitHub Releases: one release per day that ships something, tagged by date (v2026.09.12), cut by a workflow from the entries below. When a change is user-facing, add a plain one-sentence entry as part of the same PR:

npm run changelog -- --added "Sort folders by weight."
npm run changelog -- --fixed "…" --changed "…"

Entries are grouped Added / Changed / Fixed and describe the observable change, not the implementation.

Each run writes its own file under content/changelog.d/, so entries from PRs open at the same time never collide — content/changelog.json is the settled archive, and npm run changelog:compact folds fragments into it now and then. Once a day is over (Pacific), .github/workflows/releases.yml turns it into a release; a late entry updates its day's notes.

A PR comment reminds any user-facing PR that's missing an entry — but nothing auto-fills it, so the entry is always hand-written (plain, curated prose). If a PR merges without one, that day's release just omits the change until it's backfilled. For non-user-facing work, prefix the PR title (refactor:, chore:, ci:, test:, docs:, build:) or label it skip-changelog — perf: and style: don't count, since both are things a visitor notices.

License

Code is MIT. The gear catalog data under seed/ is licensed separately — see seed/LICENSE.md.

Third-party notices for the libraries bundled into the client are in public/licenses.txt, served at /licenses.txt. The file exists because Mahonia bundles its dependencies instead of loading them from a CDN (a CDN <script> could read a list's edit token out of location.hash), which makes serving the site a redistribution of that code — and the minifier strips the banner comments those libraries ship their copyright in. Add an entry when a dependency's code starts reaching the browser; server-only packages aren't redistributed and aren't listed.