PDFCabin — Self-Hosted PDF Toolkit & MCP Server

Your PDFs. Your server. Your rules. Your documents stay on your infrastructure.

English · Русский

A local document workshop: merge, split, rotate and compress PDFs, run OCR (Russian + English) on your scans, then full-text search across everything — through a web UI or directly from Claude or any other MCP-capable AI agent. One Docker container, one port (8420), zero outbound requests, no telemetry.

Why PDFCabin?

• Nothing leaves your machine. All processing runs locally in a single container. No cloud calls, no analytics, no telemetry — even the web UI ships without a single external URL (no CDN, system fonts only).

• Russian + English OCR out of the box. Built on Tesseract and OCRmyPDF: scanned PDFs get a searchable text layer, and everything recognized becomes full-text searchable.

• Your AI agents get tools. A built-in MCP server (streamable HTTP) exposes 15 focused tools — Claude, or any MCP client, can import, create, merge, compress, OCR, read, rename and search your documents without a single file leaving your server.

Related MCP server: pdfeverything

Quick start

docker run -d -p 8420:8420 -v ./docs:/docs ghcr.io/legitantiaa/pdfcabin:latest

Open http://localhost:8420 and drop some PDFs. Everything the app writes — your files and the search index index.db — stays in the ./docs folder you mounted.

To protect the instance with a token:

docker run -d -p 8420:8420 -v ./docs:/docs -e PDFCABIN_TOKEN=change-me ghcr.io/legitantiaa/pdfcabin:latest

Or build from source:

git clone https://github.com/LegitAntiAA/pdfcabin.git
cd pdfcabin
docker compose up --build

Security note: inside Docker the app listens on 0.0.0.0:8420. Don't expose it bare to the internet — set PDFCABIN_TOKEN and put it behind a reverse proxy.

Features

The bundled web UI (vanilla JS, no build step, no CDN) gives you a drag-and-drop upload zone, a thumbnail grid with OCR status badges, batch actions (merge / compress / OCR / delete), a jobs drawer and a search bar — dark and light themes, English and Russian interface.

REST API

Honest note on search: it matches exact word forms (SQLite FTS5, unicode61 tokenizer) — no stemming. Searching Russian «договор» will not match «договора».

MCP tools

Paths in MCP tools are relative to the documents folder — the agent never needs to know your mounts. The MCP endpoint is served by the same app and port as the UI and the REST API, and PDFCABIN_TOKEN (when set) applies to it too.

MCP connection

MCP transport: streamable HTTP, URL http://localhost:8420/mcp.

Claude Desktop

claude_desktop_config.json (Settings → Developer → Edit Config):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pdfcabin": {
      "url": "http://localhost:8420/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Claude Code

claude mcp add --transport http pdfcabin http://localhost:8420/mcp

Cursor

~/.cursor/mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pdfcabin": {
      "url": "http://localhost:8420/mcp"
    }
  }
}

With a token

If PDFCABIN_TOKEN is set, add an Authorization: Bearer header:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pdfcabin": {
      "url": "http://localhost:8420/mcp",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_TOKEN"
      }
    }
  }
}

claude mcp add --transport http pdfcabin http://localhost:8420/mcp --header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN"

Any other MCP client speaks the same JSON shape — point it at http://localhost:8420/mcp.

Configuration

Screenshots

Development

Run locally without Docker:

• Python 3.11+

• System packages: Tesseract OCR with the rus and eng language data, and Ghostscript (used for strong compression)

pip install -e ".[dev]"
uvicorn app.main:app --port 8420

Files live in ./docs by default (override with PDFCABIN_DOCS_DIR).

pytest                # full suite; OCR tests are marked `slow` and need tesseract with the configured languages
pytest -m "not slow"  # skip the OCR tests
ruff check .          # lint

Roadmap

• v0.1 (this scope): merge / split / rotate / delete pages / compress / OCR (rus+eng) / full-text search / 15 MCP tools / web UI / Docker.

• v0.2: watermark, password protect/unlock, DOCX→PDF (optional, as a separate image), drag-and-drop page reordering in the UI, a redo-OCR button, more OCR languages.

• v0.3: watch-folder (auto-OCR of new files), webhooks, read-only REST keys, export to Paperless-ngx.

• v1.0: search with stemming (Russian), PWA.

Donate

PDFCabin is free and will stay free. If it saves you time, you can support the project:

License

MIT.

Built on Tesseract OCR, OCRmyPDF, pikepdf, FastMCP and Ghostscript. Ghostscript is AGPL-licensed and invoked by PDFCabin as a separate process.