haiku.rag/docs/mcp.md

Model Context Protocol (MCP)

The MCP server exposes haiku.rag as MCP tools for compatible MCP clients like Claude Desktop.

Starting MCP Server

The MCP server supports Streamable HTTP and stdio transports:

# Default streamable HTTP transport on 127.0.0.1:8001
haiku-rag mcp

# Custom port
haiku-rag mcp --port 9000

# Bind to all interfaces (e.g. inside a container)
haiku-rag mcp --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8001

# stdio transport (for Claude Desktop)
haiku-rag mcp --stdio

--host defaults to 127.0.0.1 (loopback only). Bind to 0.0.0.0 only when you want the MCP server reachable from outside the local machine — e.g. inside a Docker container with port mapping, or on a trusted LAN.

The server opens the database read-only. Ingestion goes through the CLI (haiku-rag add, add-src, delete) or haiku-ingester.

Collections

With several databases in lancedb.databases, the server covers all of them, as haiku-rag search does. Results, documents and citations name theirs in source. sources on the search and question tools restricts a call to a subset; source on get_document names the database holding the document. A name the server does not cover is an error. haiku-rag --db-name NAME mcp serves one. See Multiple Databases.

Claude Desktop Integration

Add to your Claude Desktop configuration (claude_desktop_config.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "haiku-rag": {
      "command": "haiku-rag",
      "args": ["mcp", "--stdio"]
    }
  }
}

With a custom database path:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "haiku-rag": {
      "command": "haiku-rag",
      "args": ["mcp", "--stdio", "--db", "/path/to/database.lancedb"]
    }
  }
}

After restarting Claude Desktop, you can ask Claude to search your documents or answer questions using your knowledge base.

Tools

Every tool is read-only and says so in its annotations. Each parameter carries a description in the tool schema, so the listing below names them without repeating it.

Tool	Registered	Parameters
search_documents	always	query, limit, include_images, filter, sources
search_documents_by_image	multimodal embedder only	image_base64, limit, include_images, filter, sources
get_document	always	document_id, source
get_document_outline	always	document_id, source
get_document_section	always	document_id, section_id, source
list_documents	always	limit, offset, filter
ask_question	always	question, images_base64, sources
analyze	always	question, filter, images_base64, sources

search_documents runs hybrid search, vector and full-text, and returns results best first. Scores are not comparable across queries or search types. Rank is the signal. include_images attaches picture bytes as base64 PNG under image_data. search_documents_by_image embeds the query image and searches by vector similarity alone.

get_document returns a document whole, in reading order. For a long one, get_document_outline returns the heading tree with page numbers and get_document_section the text of one section, subsections included; a node's id in the outline is the section_id. A document without headings has an empty outline. list_documents returns titles, URIs and metadata, which is how a client learns what a filter can match.

ask_question runs the RAG agent on the server and returns an answer followed by its citations. analyze writes and runs Python in a sandbox over the documents, for counting, aggregation and computation across documents. Both cost a model call.

Filters

filter is a SQL WHERE clause over the document columns id, uri, title, metadata, created_at, updated_at. metadata is a JSON string, so match its keys with LIKE:

metadata LIKE '%"author": "Smith"%'
uri LIKE '%.pdf'
title = 'Q3 report'

Errors

A failure is an MCP error, never an empty result. Expected failures carry a message: a document or section id that matches nothing, a collection the server does not cover, a filter the query engine rejects (with its message), invalid base64, and an ask_question or analyze failure naming only the exception type. Anything else reaches the client as Error calling tool 'name' and its traceback goes to the server log.

Instructions

The server publishes instructions describing the knowledge base: what it holds, when to reach for it, the collection names when it covers several, and prompts.domain_preamble when set. Claude Code shows them to the model. Claude Desktop does not, so every tool description stands on its own.

Continuous ingestion

For continuous document ingestion (filesystem watch, S3 polling, HTTP sources, a job queue with retries), run haiku-ingester as a separate process against the same LanceDB.