# mcp-local-rag MCP Server

Easy-to-setup local RAG server with minimal configuration

**Publisher claimed.** No tool list reported, and Pod has not connected to this server.

## Status

Pod has not dialled mcp-local-rag yet, so everything on this page is what its publisher reported rather than what we observed. Registries describe servers; they do not connect to them. Until a check runs, treat the tool list below as a claim.

## Connect

Published as `mcp-local-rag` on npm. Runs locally.

## Known issues

**22 problems reported by people outside the maintainer team.** Issues filed by the project's own owners, members and collaborators are excluded — those are release checklists and internal refactors, not things that will go wrong for you. Showing 12.

### Most discussed

### Feature request: page screenshot

Hi!

I've noticed that my model quite often tries to render the pdf directly after retrieving the query results. Probably it was looking for diagrams or table layouts. I think it could be quite useful to provide a tool that returns an image of a page (by page number or by chunk index) as an [MCP image content](https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2026-07-28/server/tools#image-content), i.e.:

```json
{
  "content": [
    {
      "type": "text",
      "text": "iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAA...

[Read the thread](https://github.com/shinpr/mcp-local-rag/issues/189) · 2026-08-20 · closed · external user · 3 comments

### Startup speed

I am not sure if it's actually a `mcp-local-rag` issue, but I am experiencing a slow startup speed with codex.
It takes me 15-22 seconds (inconsistent) to initialize the MCP server. The CLI `npx mcp-local-rag status` takes about 5 seconds. And the same mcp-local-rag mcp server wrapped as HTTP server with `supergateway` takes about 10 seconds (consistently) to initialize.
How can I debug it?

[Read the thread](https://github.com/shinpr/mcp-local-rag/issues/184) · 2026-08-10 · closed · external user · 2 comments

### Feature request: optional filter on list_files

Hi. I’m testing `mcp-local-rag` on a volume containing several thousand files. I’m using the Zed editor with a custom MCP setup and OpenAI.

The `list_files` tool runs into a timeout when trying to find files with a specific name or when opening a specific directory.

This appears to be related to: https://github.com/shinpr/mcp-local-rag/issues/146

There should be a filter or scope option to limit the result set.

[Read the thread](https://github.com/shinpr/mcp-local-rag/issues/165) · 2026-07-08 · closed · external user · 4 comments

### Feature request: optional scope filter on query_documents to search one corpus in a shared database

**What I'm asking for**

An optional `scope` parameter on `query_documents` (and the `query` CLI) that limits a search to documents under one or more path prefixes. Today one database mixes every ingested corpus, and a query cannot target just one.

**Why it matters**

I run several corpora through one server: meeting transcripts, separate research studies, general docs. With a shared `DB_PATH`, every query ranks across all of them, so a chunk from an unrelated corpus can sit close to my query i

[Read the thread](https://github.com/shinpr/mcp-local-rag/issues/146) · 2026-06-11 · closed · external user · 2 comments

### Feature Request: Support Incremental Synchronization

## Current Behavior
Currently, updating the document index requires a full re-ingestion of the target directory. 

## Desired Behavior
Add support for incremental updates. The index should be able to synchronize with the filesystem by:
1. Detecting changes (modifications) to existing files.
2. Identifying new files.
3. Detecting and removing (pruning) files that have been deleted from disk.

[Read the thread](https://github.com/shinpr/mcp-local-rag/issues/121) · 2026-05-12 · closed · outside contributor · 2 comments

### Most recent

### Question about the `sync` command in the CLI

I'm using multiple databases with mcp-local-rag.
I successfully created and populated a database using the ingest command with --base-dir.
Later, I tried to update the same database using the sync command, but sync returned the following error.
Is there a way to specify the base directory when running sync from the CLI?
If not, what is the recommended workflow for updating an existing database created with ingest --base-dir?

- Successful ingest command
  - npx mcp-local-rag --db-path "D:\mcp_ra

[Read the thread](https://github.com/shinpr/mcp-local-rag/issues/185) · 2026-08-11 · closed · external user · 1 comment

### ingest_file effectively hangs on documents with a long unbroken line (batch padding amplifies an untruncated ~3.5k-token sentence)

## Summary

`ingest_file` effectively never completes (silent, runaway memory) on markdown/text documents that contain a single long unbroken line with no sentence punctuation — e.g. a comma-separated list of API resource paths, a long URL list, or minified data. The server logs `Parsed MD: ...` and then goes quiet while the process spins at high CPU with RSS climbing past 3GB. In production this repeatedly ate entire 60-minute ingest runs; in a controlled test the stuck batch was killed at 180s

[Read the thread](https://github.com/shinpr/mcp-local-rag/issues/178) · 2026-07-28 · closed · external user · 1 comment

### Feature Request: --chunk-size, or support for models like bge-large-zh-1.5?

I often encounter errors when using models like bge-large-zh-1.5 or gte-large, like this:

```
[MCP Server] 26-05-28 02:26:07.0061665 [E:onnxruntime:, sequential_executor.cc:572 onnxruntime::ExecuteK
[MCP Server] ernel] Non-zero status code returned while running Add node. Name:'/embeddin
[MCP Server] gs/Add_1' Status Message: E:\_work\1\s\onnxruntime\core/providers/cpu/math/e
[MCP Server] lement_wise_ops.h:560 onnxruntime::BroadcastIterator::Append axis == 1 || a
[MCP Server] xis == largest was

[Read the thread](https://github.com/shinpr/mcp-local-rag/issues/142) · 2026-05-27 · closed · external user · 2 comments

### Feature request: Support multiple BASE_DIR roots for local document search

# Support multiple BASE_DIR roots for local document search

## Feature request

Support configuring more than one document root for `mcp-local-rag`, while preserving the current path-safety guarantees of `BASE_DIR`.

## Problem

Today, `BASE_DIR` appears to be a single document root. This works well when all searchable documents live under one parent directory, but it is awkward when a user has documents split across multiple unrelated directories, for example:

- `~/Documents/work`
- `~/Docume

[Read the thread](https://github.com/shinpr/mcp-local-rag/issues/139) · 2026-05-22 · closed · external user · 1 comment

### feat: incremental sync_data with non-blocking progress notifications

## Feature

Add a `sync_data` MCP tool and `sync` CLI subcommand for incremental synchronisation of a directory against the vector DB.

## Motivation

Currently ingesting a large directory re-embeds everything from scratch on every run. An incremental sync should diff disk state against DB state (using content hashes), only re-embed changed files, and prune deleted files — making repeated syncs fast.

Additionally, the current `ingest` flow blocks until complete. For large directories this gives

[Read the thread](https://github.com/shinpr/mcp-local-rag/issues/129) · 2026-05-14 · closed · outside contributor · 1 comment

### Feature request: GPU support

## Feature

Enable GPU acceleration for embedding generation.

## Motivation

My CPU fan is noisy.

[Read the thread](https://github.com/shinpr/mcp-local-rag/issues/127) · 2026-05-14 · closed · outside contributor · 0 comments

### feat: zero-build npx execution support

## Feature

Allow the package to run directly from source via `npx` without requiring a prior build step.

Currently the `bin` entry points to `dist/index.js`, so users must run `pnpm build` before `npx mcp-local-rag` works. A thin wrapper script would let npx invoke `tsx` directly on the source.

## Additional benefit

`npx`/`npm` set `INIT_CWD` to the original working directory, but `process.cwd()` can point to the npx cache. Without correcting for this, relative paths like `./lancedb/` resolv

[Read the thread](https://github.com/shinpr/mcp-local-rag/issues/125) · 2026-05-14 · closed · outside contributor · 1 comment

[See all 19 reports Pod holds for mcp-local-rag](/mcp/mcp-local-rag/issues) — of 22 qualified upstream.

## Firsthand observations

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- 22 problems reported from outside the maintainer team
- No tool list published — Pod has not verified what it exposes
- If you use mcp-local-rag, write down what actually happened so the next agent pays less

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