Lebanese Legislation

Why

The texts of Lebanese law are public, but hard to read online. LebaneseLegislation.com puts every law, decree, ruling and Gazette issue on its own page, links each article to the texts that amend it and the rulings that apply it, and gives developers and AI assistants the same data through an API, an MCP server and open downloads. Every page links back to its source at the Lebanese University's Centre for Research and Studies in Legal Informatics.

Related MCP server: korean-law-mcp

Start in one minute

Read and search at lebaneselegislation.com. Questions get a short answer written only from the library's own texts, with a link to each source.

Connect your AI assistant. The MCP server is free, needs no key, and returns the texts word for word:

claude mcp add --transport http lebanese-legislation https://lebaneselegislation.com/mcp

Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and Gemini setup: lebaneselegislation.com/ai and docs/mcp.md.

Call the API. No key, JSON, described by /openapi.json:

curl -G 'https://lebaneselegislation.com/api/v1/search/' --data-urlencode 'q=قانون العمل'

Load the data. One Parquet file per table on Hugging Face:

from datasets import load_dataset
articles = load_dataset("taktekhq/lebanese-legislation", "legislation_article", split="train")

Run the whole site yourself. One image holds the database, the website, the API and the MCP server:

git clone https://github.com/taktekhq/lebanese-legislation.git && cd lebanese-legislation
./setup && docker compose --profile all up -d all   # then open http://localhost:8080

Where everything is

Data lives on Hugging Face. Code and Docker images live here. Each GitHub release is a code version, never a data download.

How it runs

flowchart LR
  UL[Lebanese University<br>source pages] -->|scraper| A[archive/]
  A -->|build-db| D[data/<br>tables as text]
  D -->|data workflow| HF[Hugging Face<br>Parquet + vectors]
  D -->|static-site workflow| R2[(Cloudflare R2<br>static pages)]
  D -->|data workflow| IMG[-db and -all images]
  IMG -->|origin workflow| C[Cloudflare Container<br>PostgreSQL + Go server]
  R2 --> W{Worker}
  C --> W
  W --> U[Readers, AI assistants,<br>API clients]

Cloudflare serves the static pages and ruling PDFs from R2 through the Worker in workers/static-site. Search, /api/v1/, filters, scans and /mcp go through workers/origin to a blue/green Cloudflare Container running the -all image. static-site.yml renders data/ with cmd/static-export, only the pages that changed: a data change renders the pages its rows touch, a template, string or topic guide change the pages that used it, and a Go change every page. It starts on every push to main that touches the site, and a catch-up check after each deploy reruns a failed one. Changed pages go to IndexNow. vectors.yml embeds new passages, publishes the vectors and loads Cloudflare Vectorize. See architecture and static export.

AI crawlers are welcome. robots.txt lets every named AI crawler (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, ShapBot and others) read the pages, search, the API and the MCP server. Every client gets the same limit on dynamic paths: 30 requests per 10 seconds from one address.

Update the data yourself

Run scripts/nightly.sh on your own machine to scrape, rebuild, check and export the data, then open a data-only pull request. Use --dry-run to do the work locally without pushing or opening a PR. GitHub Actions cannot run it.

You need Bash, flock, Git, rsync, curl, Python 3, Go, PostgreSQL and an authenticated GitHub CLI. Set LEBLEG_DSN to a dedicated rebuild database; LEBLEG_STORE, LEBLEG_DATA and LEBLEG_LOCK_FILE override local paths. LEBLEG_REPO selects the target repository. Maintainers merge the PR, then the workflows publish everything. See Update the data for requirements, every step, configuration and a nightly user systemd timer.

Production and development

The same image, ghcr.io/taktekhq/lebanese-legislation-all, runs in both. It holds PostgreSQL with the data, the API (/api/v1/), the MCP server (/mcp) and the website server.

In development every page is rendered on request, which is slower than production but needs nothing besides the image. To get the exact static copy production serves, run static-export against the database: see docs/static-export.md.

Run the services locally

git clone https://github.com/taktekhq/lebanese-legislation.git
cd lebanese-legislation
./setup
docker compose --profile all up -d all

You need Docker Compose, 8 GB of free memory and 30 GB of free disk. ./setup writes private local passwords to .env. The image already holds both databases. The first start copies them into an empty volume; later starts reuse it.

Then open the website at http://localhost:8080, the API at http://localhost:8080/api/v1/, or point an MCP client at http://localhost:8080/mcp.

To run the database, API and MCP as separate services instead, use docker compose up -d --wait db api mcp: the API answers on http://localhost:8000/api/v1/ and MCP on http://localhost:8001/mcp. Every image is pulled as :latest, so a docker compose pull is all an update needs. Exact and citation search need no AI key. For search by meaning, configure your own Gemini key and Vectorize index, or load the public vectors into pgvector in lebleg_search. See loading vectors.

Images

All names use the prefix ghcr.io/taktekhq/lebanese-legislation.

Each image is built by the workflow that produces its inputs: the checks workflow publishes -api, -mcp and -all after a push to main, data publishes -db and -all after a data change, and vectors publishes -vectors. images.yml is a manual button to rebuild one. Every image gets a latest tag and a UTC date tag, so use :latest unless you need a fixed copy. Static pages are published directly to R2. Publishing of -web and -data has stopped; existing registry packages remain. Compose pulls ghcr.io/taktekhq/lebanese-legislation-all:latest for the website, including its database, API and MCP.

API and MCP candidates are smoke-tested on both architectures before promotion; existing immutable release versions are retained and new versions are added when free.

Service reference: configuration and using your own PostgreSQL.

What is in this repository

compose.yaml runs the four images. compose.build.yaml builds them from this checkout instead. compose.local.yaml selects an already built database image. server.json is the MCP Registry entry and .mcp.json the client configuration for the hosted server.

Students: get paid to study with it

If you study law or political science at a Lebanese university right now, we pay $10 for every week you study with the site (at least 2 days a week), paid monthly, until March 2027. You tell us what is wrong, missing or hard to use, and fill in a 10-minute form once a month. We chose to spend this money on students instead of ads. Apply on LinkedIn.

Contribute and licence

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Code is MIT licensed, by Taktek and Nizar Mahmoud. The data has its own terms and attribution: credit the Centre for Research and Studies in Legal Informatics, Lebanese University, for the texts. The code licence does not cover the legal texts or court scans. This is not legal advice or an official publication. The site's privacy policy and terms of use also cover the API and MCP server.