lance-mcp
LanceDB
Documentation
🗄️ LanceDB MCP Server for LLMS
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`
{
"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:
{
"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:
npm run seed -- --dbpath --filesdirYou 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:
"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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