MCP PDF Server

📚 MCP PDF Server

An MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that lets AI assistants query your PDF documents. Drop your PDFs, ingest them into a vector database, and ask questions — answers are grounded in your actual documents.

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✨ Features

• 🔌 MCP-Compatible — Works with any MCP client (GitHub Copilot, Antigravity, etc.)
• 📄 Auto PDF Discovery — Automatically finds, extracts, chunks, and embeds all PDFs in your folder
• 🔍 Vector Search — Retrieves the most relevant passages before generating answers
• 🐳 Docker-Ready — Runs as a containerized server with one command
• 🗄️ Qdrant — Fast, open-source vector database for similarity search

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🏗️ How It Works

┌─────────────┐     MCP (stdio)     ┌───────────────────┐     HTTP      ┌──────────┐
│ AI Assistant │◄───────────────────►│  MCP PDF Server   │◄────────────►│  Qdrant  │
│              │                     │                   │              │ Vector DB│
└─────────────┘                     │  1. Embed question │              └──────────┘
                                    │  2. Search vectors │
                                    │  3. Generate answer│   LLM API
                                    │                    │◄────────────►
                                    └───────────────────┘   (Embeddings
                                                            + Generation)

1. You ask a question via your AI assistant.
2. The server embeds the question using your choice of embedding model.
3. It searches Qdrant for the top 5 most relevant text chunks from your PDFs.
4. It generates an answer using an LLM, grounded in the retrieved context.

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🚀 Quick Start

Prerequisites

• Docker & Docker Compose
• Node.js 20+ (for ingestion only)
• [LLM API Key]

1. Clone & Configure

git clone https://github.com/your-username/mcp-pdf-server.git
cd mcp-pdf-server

cp .env.example .env

Edit .env and set your API key:

API_KEY=nvapi-your_key_here

2. Start Qdrant

docker-compose up -d

3. Add Your PDFs & Ingest

Place your PDF documents in the pdfs/ folder, then:

npm install        # first time only
npm run ingest

All PDFs in the folder are automatically discovered and ingested.

4. Build the Server Image

docker build -t mcp-pdf-server .

5. Connect to Your AI Assistant

Add to your AI assistant's MCP config (e.g., mcp_config.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pdf-docs": {
      "command": "docker",
      "args": [
        "run",
        "-i",
        "--rm",
        "--network",
        "mcp-network",
        "-e",
        "API_KEY",
        "-e",
        "QDRANT_URL=http://mcp-qdrant:6333",
        "-e",
        "COLLECTION_NAME=documents",
        "-e",
        "EMBED_MODEL=nvidia/nv-embedqa-e5-v5",
        "-e",
        "GEN_MODEL=qwen/qwen2.5-coder-32b-instruct",
        "mcp-pdf-server"
      ],
      "env": {
        "API_KEY": "your_nvapi_key_here"
      }
    }
  }
}

Done! Ask your AI assistant any question about your documents.

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🔧 Available Tools

| Tool | Description | | --------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | ask_documents | Ask any question. The server retrieves relevant context from your ingested PDFs and generates an answer. |

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⚙️ Environment Variables

| Variable | Description | Default | | ------------------- | ----------------------------- | --------------------------------- | | API_KEY | LLM API key | _(required)_ | | EMBED_MODEL | Embedding model | nvidia/nv-embedqa-e5-v5 | | GEN_MODEL | Generation model | qwen/qwen2.5-coder-32b-instruct | | COLLECTION_NAME | Qdrant collection name | documents | | QDRANT_URL | Qdrant connection URL | http://localhost:6333 | | EMBED_BATCH_SIZE | Chunks per embedding batch | 15 | | EMBED_MAX_RETRIES | Max retries on API failure | 3 | | EMBED_COOLOFF_MS | Cooldown between batches (ms) | 500 |

Note: The .env file is used for local ingestion. The mcp_config.json passes env vars via Docker -e flags for the server.

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📁 Project Structure

mcp-pdf-server/
├── pdfs/                     # Place your PDF documents here
├── src/
│   ├── server.ts             # MCP server entry point
│   ├── llm/
│   │   └── provider.ts       # LLM API client (embed + generate)
│   ├── vector/
│   │   └── qdrant.ts         # Qdrant client config
│   └── ingest/
│       ├── main.ts           # Ingestion orchestrator (auto-discovers PDFs)
│       ├── extract.ts        # PDF text extraction
│       ├── chunk.ts          # Text chunking
│       └── embed.ts          # Batch embedding & Qdrant insertion
├── docker-compose.yml        # Qdrant service
├── Dockerfile                # Server image
├── .env.example              # Env var template (safe to commit)
├── .gitignore                # Keeps secrets & binaries out of git
└── package.json

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🛠️ Development

For local development with hot-reloading:

npm install
docker-compose up -d    # Start Qdrant
npm run dev             # Server with hot-reload

To use the local dev server with your AI assistant, change mcp_config.json to:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pdf-docs": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["tsx", "src/server.ts"],
      "cwd": "/path/to/mcp-pdf-server",
      "env": {
        "API_KEY": "your_nvapi_key_here",
        "QDRANT_URL": "http://localhost:6333",
        "COLLECTION_NAME": "documents",
        "EMBED_MODEL": "nvidia/nv-embedqa-e5-v5",
        "GEN_MODEL": "qwen/qwen2.5-coder-32b-instruct"
      }
    }
  }
}

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📝 Use Cases

This server works with any PDF knowledge base:

• 📖 Technical books — Architecture, algorithms, system design
• 📋 Company docs — Wikis, runbooks, policies
• 📄 Research papers — Academic papers, whitepapers
• 📑 Legal documents — Contracts, compliance
• 🎓 Course material — Textbooks, lecture notes

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🐛 Troubleshooting

| Problem | Solution | | ------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Server can't reach Qdrant | docker ps — Ensure mcp-qdrant is running on mcp-network | | Embeddings mismatch | Changed EMBED_MODEL? Delete qdrant_storage/ and re-ingest | | Rebuild server image | docker build -t mcp-pdf-server . after code changes | | Reset all data | Delete ./qdrant_storage/ and re-run npm run ingest | | Rate limiting | Increase EMBED_COOLOFF_MS or decrease EMBED_BATCH_SIZE in .env | | No PDFs found | Ensure .pdf files are placed in the pdfs/ directory |

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📄 License

ISC