Go Docs Mcp

Go-Docs MCP

> Install and Go. One command, single binary. Your AI reads any document — PDF, text, Markdown, DOCX, images.

MCP server for multi-format document access — read, search, extract images, OCR, and fetch documents from URLs via the Model Context Protocol. 13 tools, 6 formats, zero configuration.

go install github.com/drolosoft/go-docs-mcp@latest
# That's it. Single binary, starts in milliseconds.

For a deeper look at why an MCP server beats a direct tool, see [Why MCP?](doc/WHY-MCP.md)

---

🏆 Why Go-Docs MCP?

Every other document MCP server handles one format — a PDF server for PDFs, a DOCX server for DOCX. You'd need three separate servers to read three formats.

| | Go-Docs MCP | Others | |--|:---:|:---:| | Single binary, no runtime | Yes | Need Node/Python | | go install one-liner | Yes | npm+deps or pip+venv | | Multi-format (6 types) | Yes | One format each | | Full-text search | Yes | Partial or none | | OCR (scanned PDFs + images) | Yes | Rare | | Image & table extraction | Yes | Partial | | Document outline | Yes | Rare | | Fetch from URL | Yes | Rare | | Dir-locked, read-only | Yes | Varies | | Smart caching | Yes | No | | Fully offline | Yes | Yes |

Go-Docs MCP reads them all from a single binary — fast, secure, and dependency-free at runtime.

---

📋 Features — 13 Tools

| Category | Tool | Description | |----------|------|-------------| | Discovery | list_documents | List all documents with metadata (format, pages, size) | | Discovery | list_formats | List supported formats and dependency status | | Reading | read_document | Full text, specific page, or page ranges from any format | | Reading | read_url | Download from URL and extract text (50MB max) | | Reading | get_document_summary | First 3 pages as a quick overview | | Search | search_document | Case-insensitive full-text search with context | | Analysis | get_document_metadata | Title, author, dates, version, page count | | Analysis | get_document_outline | Table of contents / bookmarks | | Analysis | extract_tables | Tables as structured data | | Analysis | extract_images | Images as base64 (max 10 per call) | | OCR | ocr_document | Force OCR on scanned/image-based PDFs | | OCR | read_image | Extract text from PNG, JPG, TIFF via OCR | | Export | convert_to_markdown | Convert any document to clean Markdown |

Highlights:

• Fast — mtime-based in-memory caching avoids redundant extraction
• Multi-format — PDF, TXT, MD, CSV, DOCX, and images from one server
• OCR — automatic fallback to tesseract for scanned documents
• Secure — directory-locked with path traversal prevention
• Portable — works on macOS and Linux

---

📄 Supported Formats

| Format | Dependencies | Notes | |--------|-------------|-------| | PDF | poppler (pdftotext, pdfinfo, pdfimages, pdftoppm) | Full support — text, images, metadata, OCR fallback | | TXT, MD, CSV | None | Native, zero dependencies | | DOCX | pandoc (optional) | Word document extraction | | Images (PNG, JPG, TIFF) | tesseract (optional) | OCR text extraction |

---

📦 Prerequisites

• Go 1.25+ (install)
• poppler — required for PDF support
• tesseract (optional) — enables OCR for scanned docs and images
• pandoc (optional) — enables DOCX support

# macOS
brew install poppler
brew install tesseract        # optional: OCR
brew install pandoc           # optional: DOCX

# Debian/Ubuntu
apt install poppler-utils
apt install tesseract-ocr     # optional: OCR
apt install pandoc            # optional: DOCX

# Fedora/RHEL
dnf install poppler-utils
dnf install tesseract         # optional: OCR
dnf install pandoc            # optional: DOCX

> Note: TXT, MD, and CSV work out of the box with zero dependencies. Install only what you need.

---

🚀 Installation

From source

go install github.com/drolosoft/go-docs-mcp@latest

Build locally

git clone https://github.com/drolosoft/go-docs-mcp.git
cd go-docs-mcp
make build      # produces ./go-docs-mcp
make install    # installs to /usr/local/bin/

---

⚙️ Configuration

Go-Docs MCP reads documents from a configured directory. Set DOCS_MCP_DIR to change it:

| Variable | Default | Description | |----------|---------|-------------| | DOCS_MCP_DIR | ~/.docs-mcp/documents/ | Directory containing documents to serve | | PDF_MCP_DIR | (legacy alias) | Backward-compatible alias for DOCS_MCP_DIR |

Place your documents in the directory and the server finds them automatically. All supported formats are detected.

---

💡 Usage

With Claude Code

Add to your .claude/settings.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "docs": {
      "command": "go-docs-mcp",
      "env": {
        "DOCS_MCP_DIR": "/path/to/your/documents"
      }
    }
  }
}

With Claude Desktop

Add to ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json (macOS):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "docs": {
      "command": "/usr/local/bin/go-docs-mcp",
      "env": {
        "DOCS_MCP_DIR": "/path/to/your/documents"
      }
    }
  }
}

With any MCP client

The server communicates over stdio using JSON-RPC 2.0:

echo '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/list","params":{}}' | go-docs-mcp

---

📖 Tool Reference

list_documents

Lists all documents in the configured directory with format detection.

Parameters: None

Example output:

[
  {
    "filename": "architecture-guide.pdf",
    "format": "pdf",
    "title": "architecture-guide",
    "pages": 42,
    "size_bytes": 1048576
  },
  {
    "filename": "notes.md",
    "format": "markdown",
    "title": "notes",
    "size_bytes": 4096
  }
]

---

list_formats

Lists all supported document formats and their dependency status.

Parameters: None

---

read_document

Reads the extracted text content of a document. Automatically falls back to OCR if the document is image-based/scanned and pdftotext returns empty text.

Parameters:

| Name | Type | Required | Description | |------|------|----------|-------------| | filename | string | Yes | The document filename to read | | page | number | No | Single page number (1-based). Omit for full text. | | pages | string | No | Page ranges, e.g. "1-5", "10", "1-3,7,10-12". Overrides page. |

Example input:

{
  "filename": "architecture-guide.pdf",
  "pages": "1-3,10-12"
}

---

search_document

Searches within a document for lines matching a query. Returns matches with 2 lines of context and approximate page numbers.

Parameters:

| Name | Type | Required | Description | |------|------|----------|-------------| | filename | string | Yes | The document filename to search | | query | string | Yes | Search query (case-insensitive) |

Example output:

Found 3 matches for 'microservice' in architecture-guide.pdf:

--- Match 1 (page ~2, line 45) ---
  The system is composed of several
> microservice components that communicate
  via gRPC and message queues.

---

get_document_summary

Returns the text from the first 3 pages of a document as a quick summary.

Parameters:

| Name | Type | Required | Description | |------|------|----------|-------------| | filename | string | Yes | The document filename to summarize |

---

get_document_metadata

Returns full document metadata.

Parameters:

| Name | Type | Required | Description | |------|------|----------|-------------| | filename | string | Yes | The document filename to get metadata for |

Example output:

{
  "title": "Architecture Guide",
  "author": "Jane Doe",
  "subject": "System Design",
  "creator": "LaTeX",
  "producer": "pdfTeX",
  "creation_date": "Thu May 15 10:30:00 2025",
  "modification_date": "Thu May 15 10:30:00 2025",
  "pages": 42,
  "file_size_bytes": 1048576,
  "pdf_version": "1.5"
}

---

get_document_outline

Extracts the document outline (table of contents / bookmarks) as a structured list.

Parameters:

| Name | Type | Required | Description | |------|------|----------|-------------| | filename | string | Yes | The document filename to extract outline from |

---

extract_tables

Extracts tables from a document as structured data.

Parameters:

| Name | Type | Required | Description | |------|------|----------|-------------| | filename | string | Yes | The document filename to extract tables from | | page | number | No | Specific page to extract from. Omit for all pages. |

---

extract_images

Extracts images from a document as base64-encoded data. Returns up to 10 images per call.

Parameters:

| Name | Type | Required | Description | |------|------|----------|-------------| | filename | string | Yes | The document filename to extract images from | | page | number | No | Specific page to extract from. Omit for all pages. |

Example output:

[
  {
    "page": 1,
    "index": 0,
    "format": "jpeg",
    "width": 800,
    "height": 600,
    "data_base64": "/9j/4AAQSkZJRg..."
  }
]

---

read_url

Downloads a document from a URL and extracts its text content. Maximum file size: 50MB.

Parameters:

| Name | Type | Required | Description | |------|------|----------|-------------| | url | string | Yes | The URL of the document to download and read | | pages | string | No | Page ranges to extract, e.g. "1-5". Omit for full text. |

Example input:

{
  "url": "https://example.com/report.pdf",
  "pages": "1-3"
}

---

ocr_document

Forces OCR on a PDF document using tesseract. Useful for scanned/image-based PDFs or when pdftotext returns garbled text. Requires tesseract and pdftoppm.

> Note: read_document already auto-detects image-based PDFs and falls back to OCR. Use ocr_document when you want to force OCR regardless, or need to specify a non-English language.

Parameters:

| Name | Type | Required | Description | |------|------|----------|-------------| | filename | string | Yes | The PDF filename to OCR | | page | number | No | Specific page to OCR (1-based). Omit for all pages. | | language | string | No | Tesseract language code (default: eng). Use spa, fra, etc. |

Example input:

{
  "filename": "scanned-contract.pdf",
  "page": 1,
  "language": "spa"
}

---

read_image

Extracts text from an image file using OCR. Supports PNG, JPG, and TIFF. Requires tesseract.

Parameters:

| Name | Type | Required | Description | |------|------|----------|-------------| | filename | string | Yes | The image filename to read (PNG, JPG, TIFF) | | language | string | No | Tesseract language code (default: eng). |

Example input:

{
  "filename": "receipt.png",
  "language": "eng"
}

---

🔒 Security

• Directory-locked — only files within DOCS_MCP_DIR are accessible
• Path traversal prevention — filenames sanitized; ../ rejected
• Extension filter — only supported formats served
• Read-only — no write operations
• URL downloads — 50MB limit, Content-Type validated, temp files cleaned immediately

---

🛠️ Development

make build     # Build the binary
make test      # Run tests with race detector
make clean     # Remove build artifacts

Project structure

go-docs-mcp/
  main.go              # MCP server setup, 12 tool registrations
  internal/
    pdf/
      reader.go        # Document extraction, caching, search, metadata, images, OCR
  Makefile             # Build targets
  go.mod               # Module definition

---

🦙 Glama Score

---

📄 License

[MIT](LICENSE) - Copyright 2026 Drolosoft

---

💛 Support

---

Drolosoft — Tools we wish existed

Source & license

This open-source MCP server is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: drolosoft
• Source: drolosoft/go-docs-mcp
• License: MIT
• Homepage: https://drolosoft.com/go-docs-mcp.html

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.