How to Connect Hermes Agent or OpenClaw to Your Mac

Give the Hermes Agent (Nous Research) or an OpenClaw deployment direct access to your Mac apps — Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Teams, OneDrive, and 130+ tools — over the Model Context Protocol. Local stdio when Hermes runs on your Mac, or remote HTTP via the encrypted Cloud Relay when it doesn't.

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LMCP··5 min read

The Short Version

LMCP is a standard MCP server, and both the Hermes Agent (Nous Research) and OpenClaw (managed Hermes hosting) are MCP-compatible agents. So you don’t need a bespoke connector — LMCP works with them today. There are two ways to wire it up:

  • Local stdio — when Hermes runs on the same Mac as your apps. Hermes launches LMCP directly.
  • Remote HTTP — when Hermes/OpenClaw runs elsewhere (a server, OpenClaw’s managed cloud). It reaches your Mac through the encrypted LMCP Cloud Relay.

What This Lets You Do

From Hermes or OpenClaw you can ask, in plain language:

  • “Summarize my unread emails from this week”
  • “What’s on my calendar today?”
  • “Search emails about the Q3 budget”
  • “Summarize the engineering Teams channel from yesterday”

Hermes discovers LMCP’s tools automatically at startup and calls them during the conversation. Mail runs through Mail.app, Calendar through EventKit, Teams through the local cache — all on your Mac.

Step 1: Install LMCP on Your Mac

  1. Download the LMCP installer (.dmg, macOS 13+).
  2. Open the .dmg, drag Local MCP to Applications, and open it from Applications.
  3. macOS may ask you to confirm opening an app from the internet — click Open.

LMCP starts automatically and puts an icon in your menu bar. Setup takes about 30 seconds.

Option A — Local stdio (Hermes runs on your Mac)

This is the fastest path and the most private: no network hop at all. Use the Hermes CLI:

hermes mcp add local-mcp --command npx --args "-y,local-mcp@latest"

Or add it by hand to Hermes’s config (~/.hermes/config.yaml) under the mcp_servers key:

mcp_servers:
  local-mcp:
    command: "npx"
    args: ["-y", "local-mcp@latest"]

Restart Hermes. It will discover LMCP’s 130+ tools at startup. (The npx launcher talks to the same local Mac server the menu-bar app runs.)

Option B — Remote HTTP via Cloud Relay (Hermes/OpenClaw runs elsewhere)

If Hermes is on a server, or you’re on an OpenClaw managed deployment, it can’t launch a process on your Mac — so it reaches your Mac over the encrypted Cloud Relay instead.

B1. Turn on Cloud Relay

  1. Click the LMCP icon in your menu bar and find Web AIs · Via Cloud Relay.
  2. Cloud Relay shows Connected (green) once LMCP is running — authenticated by a token, no login.
  3. Toggle Cloud Data Forwarding to ON (off by default for privacy).

B2. Copy your tokenized URL

In the Cloud Relay section, click Copy URL next to Connector token. It copies your personal URL:

https://www.local-mcp.com/mcp?token=YOUR_TOKEN

B3. Add it to Hermes (config.yaml) or OpenClaw (dashboard)

Self-hosted Hermes — add a remote server to ~/.hermes/config.yaml (on OpenClaw self-hosted it’s /opt/data/config.yaml):

mcp_servers:
  local-mcp:
    url: "https://www.local-mcp.com/mcp?token=YOUR_TOKEN"

OpenClaw managed — open your instance dashboard, add an MCP server / tool integration, and paste the tokenized URL above as the server URL. Save, and the tools appear once Cloud Data Forwarding is ON.

Privacy Story

Cloud Data Forwarding is off by default and opt-in per machine. With the local stdio path (Option A) nothing leaves your Mac at all. With the Cloud Relay path (Option B), your data still comes from your Mac — the bytes transit the encrypted tunnel between your Mac and the LMCP backend but are never persisted server-side. Toggle it off any time and the agent instantly loses access to data tools.

What Tools Are Available?

  • Mail (Mail.app + Outlook): list, read, search, send, reply, move, save attachments
  • Calendar: list events, create, update, delete
  • Contacts: search, list, get details
  • Microsoft Teams: list chats, read messages, channel messages (no Graph API)
  • OneDrive: list, read, write, move, delete, search files
  • Notes & Reminders: list, search, create, complete
  • Messages: read iMessage chats
  • OmniFocus: list tasks, projects, complete, search
  • Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF: read and create
  • Finder & Safari: search files (Spotlight), list folders, bookmarks

Troubleshooting

Hermes shows 0 tools (Cloud Relay path)

Two causes. (1) The URL is missing ?token= — without it the session is unbound and only setup_install is advertised; re-add using the full tokenized URL from Copy URL. (2) Cloud Data Forwarding is OFF — toggle it ON in the Cloud Relay section, then restart Hermes (it caches the tool list at startup).

Hermes can’t launch LMCP (stdio path)

Make sure Node 16+ is installed and on Hermes’s PATH (it runs npx). Run npx -y local-mcp@latest setup once in a terminal to prime the download, then restart Hermes.

Tools connect but return “not connected”

That tool’s integration isn’t set up on your Mac (e.g. Microsoft 365). Native apps (Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Messages) work out of the box; cloud integrations need a one-time connect step in the LMCP menu-bar app.

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