TabulaRAG

Features

• CSV/TSV ingestion — upload tabular files with automatic header detection, delimiter inference, and column type recognition (dates, money, measurements)

• Semantic search — each row is embedded via sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2 and indexed in Qdrant for natural-language retrieval with cell-level citations

• Structured queries — filter and aggregate data through the API with SQL over PostgreSQL JSON columns

• Multi-tenant workspaces — enterprises with invite codes, roles (owner / admin / querier), and switchable active workspace

• Folders & access control — public, protected, and private folders with user-group-based permissions

• MCP server — exposes Streamable HTTP + SSE endpoints so AI assistants can use your tables as a retrieval tool

• Auth — Google OAuth and email/password with verification codes and password reset (via Brevo SMTP)

• Background indexing — threaded worker pool for non-blocking embedding and Qdrant upserts with progress tracking

Related MCP server: mcp-excel

Architecture

MCP integration

TabulaRAG exposes endpoints for AI assistant integration:

Authentication: use a personal MCP token (generated from the app's MCP section) in Authorization: Bearer <token>, or the server API_KEY for automation. Tokens are scoped per user and workspace.

If your MCP client runs outside the browser (e.g. Docker, desktop app), replace localhost with your machine's IP (ipconfig on Windows, ifconfig on Mac/Linux).

Local vs. Deployed

Prerequisites (Local)

Docker Compose v2 is required (docker compose, not docker-compose). It ships with Docker Desktop on Mac and Windows. Linux users may need to install it separately.

You do not need to install Python or Node locally — everything runs inside containers.

Quick start

cp .env.example .env      # create config (edit values as needed)
./scripts/dev-up.sh        # build and start all services

Once running:

Health checks:

curl http://localhost:8000/health
curl http://localhost:8000/health/deps

Stop / logs:

./scripts/dev-down.sh
./scripts/dev-logs.sh              # all services
./scripts/dev-logs.sh backend      # single service

Environment variables

Copy .env.example to .env. The key variables:

SMTP is optional for local development. If SMTP_HOST is empty, verification and reset codes are written to the backend logs instead of being emailed. For any real deployment, configure SMTP so users receive emails.

The remaining variables in .env.example control embedding model tuning, Qdrant HNSW parameters, batch sizes, and indexing concurrency. The defaults work for local development.

License

MIT