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LanceDB

78 stars TypeScriptOthers Updated Jul 18, 2026

Documentation

🗄️ LanceDB MCP Server for LLMS

Node.js 18+
License: MIT

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that enables LLMs to interact directly the documents that they have on-disk through agentic RAG and hybrid search in LanceDB. Ask LLMs questions about the dataset as a whole or about specific documents.

✨ Features

  • 🔍 LanceDB-powered serverless vector index and document summary catalog.
  • 📊 Efficient use of LLM tokens. The LLM itself looks up what it needs when it needs.
  • 📈 Security. The index is stored locally so no data is transferred to the Cloud when using a local LLM.

🚀 Quick Start

To get started, create a local directory to store the index and add this configuration to your Claude Desktop config file:

MacOS: `~/Library/Application\ Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json`

Windows: `%APPDATA%/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json`

json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "lancedb": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "lance-mcp",
        "PATH_TO_LOCAL_INDEX_DIR"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Prerequisites

  • Node.js 18+
  • npx
  • MCP Client (Claude Desktop App for example)
  • Summarization and embedding models installed (see config.ts - by default we use Ollama models)
    • `ollama pull snowflake-arctic-embed2`
    • `ollama pull llama3.1:8b`

Demo

Local Development Mode:

json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "lancedb": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": [
        "PATH_TO_LANCE_MCP/dist/index.js",
        "PATH_TO_LOCAL_INDEX_DIR"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Use `npm run build` to build the project.

Use `npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector dist/index.js PATH_TO_LOCAL_INDEX_DIR` to run the MCP tool inspector.

Seed Data

The seed script creates two tables in LanceDB - one for the catalog of document summaries, and another one - for vectorized documents' chunks.

To run the seed script use the following command:

console
npm run seed -- --dbpath  --filesdir

You can use sample data from the docs/ directory. Feel free to adjust the default summarization and embedding models in the config.ts file. If you need to recreate the index, simply rerun the seed script with the `--overwrite` option.

Catalog

  • Document summary
  • Metadata

Chunks

  • Vectorized document chunk
  • Metadata

🎯 Example Prompts

Try these prompts with Claude to explore the functionality:

plaintext
"What documents do we have in the catalog?"
"Why is the US healthcare system so broken?"

📝 Available Tools

The server provides these tools for interaction with the index:

Catalog Tools

  • `catalog_search`: Search for relevant documents in the catalog

Chunks Tools

  • `chunks_search`: Find relevant chunks based on a specific document from the catalog
  • `all_chunks_search`: Find relevant chunks from all known documents

📜 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

Frequently asked questions

What is lance-mcp?

lance-mcp is LanceDB

How do I install lance-mcp?

Open the GitHub repository and follow its README. Most MCP servers are added to your client's MCP config, then called by your agent.

Is lance-mcp open source?

Yes — it is hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/adiom-data/lance-mcp and has 78 stars.

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