ris-austria-mcp-server

Public Hosted Server: https://ris-austria.caseyjhand.com/mcp

Overview

Austrian law from RIS, the government's official legal information system: consolidated federal, state, and municipal law, case law from Austria's courts and tribunals, the authentic gazettes back to 1848, the pre-parliamentary lawmaking pipeline, and ministerial decrees. Covers all 39 applications of the keyless RIS OGD REST API (v2.6, CC BY 4.0) and labels every document with its binding status, since only the authentic (amtssigniert) gazette text is legally binding. Runs as a stdio process, a local Streamable HTTP server, or the public hosted endpoint above.

Tools

Resources

The resource mirrors ris_get_document, so tool-only clients lose nothing.

Related MCP server: swiss-courts-mcp

Capability reference

ris_search_legislation tool

• query (full text) and title (title, short title, or abbreviation such as "DSG"); scope is federal (default) or a Bundesland, municipality switches a state scope to municipal law, and language: english searches the ~138 English translations

• in_force_as_of defaults to today in Austria and is echoed as appliedInForceAsOf; include_all_versions and the entered_force_* / left_force_* windows are mutually exclusive alternatives

• Records carry law_id (filter on it to get every section of a law), section_label, in-force dates, eli, celex_references, and content_urls; section_from/section_to, index, and sort_by narrow further

ris_search_case_law tool

• court is required, one code per call; filter by query, cited norm ("DSG §1"), case_number, decided_from/decided_to, decision_type (headnote, full_text, all), and court-conditional filters such as court_name (justiz), state (lvwg/uvs), or collection_number (vfgh/vwgh/uvs)

• Records carry case_numbers, decision_date, ecli, norms_cited, and guiding_principle on headnotes; court: normenliste returns indexed laws under norm_index instead of decisions

• A conditional filter sent to the wrong court fails as court_filter_mismatch before any upstream call

ris_search_gazette tool

• scope is federal (default), a Bundesland, district, or municipal; filter by number, part, type, published_from/published_to, issuer, district_authority, or municipality. State scopes also take series (law_gazette / ordinance_gazette) and state_era (current / legacy)

• Federal queries route to one era tier (BgblAuth 2004+, BgblPdf 1945–2003, BgblAlt 1848–1940), echoed as servedApplication; a date range crossing a tier boundary fails as cross_tier_range with the dates to split at

• Records carry binding (authentic, historical_record, consolidated_informational), authentic_pdf_url where one exists, and alex_url (the ÖNB scan) for 1848–1940 entries

ris_search_drafts tool

• stage is required: review_drafts (with in_review_on for drafts in review on a date) or government_bills (2004+, with decided_from/decided_to); ministry accepts an abbreviation such as "BMF" or a full designation

• Records carry review_deadline or decided, plus materials[]: the Erläuterungen, Textgegenüberstellung, Vorblatt/WFA, covering letter, and annexes, classified by type. Pass a materials[].url to ris_get_document to read one

ris_search_announcements tool

• collection is required: social_insurance, veterinary, court_rules, trade_exam_rules, health_structure_plans, ministerial_decrees, or council_minutes. Each accepts its own filter set, and a filter outside it fails as collection_filter_mismatch. That includes changed_since on social_insurance and veterinary, where RIS ignores it

• issuer expands ministry abbreviations ("BMF") and social-insurance carrier abbreviations ("ÖGK")

• Records carry binding (authentic for five collections, administrative_directive for decrees, preparatory for council minutes), authentic_pdf_url, and document_url, the only browsable view of council minutes and decrees

ris_lookup_citation tool

• One citation per call, auto-classified as a norm ("§ 6 DSG", "DSG §1"), gazette number ("BGBl. I Nr. 165/1999", "RGBl. Nr. 189/1902"), case number ("Ro 2026/03/0016"), or collection number ("VfSlg 19.632/2012"). kind forces a route, court and state hints narrow it, and in_force_as_of pins a norm's version (default today)

• Returns found, kind, and a record in the matching search tool's shape, with alternatives_count when more than one document matched. A miss returns found: false with guidance instead of an error

ris_get_document tool

• Address by document_number + application, or by a document_url from content_urls or a draft's materials[].url, on www.ris.bka.gv.at or ogd.ris.bka.gv.at; format is markdown (default), html, xml, or urls_only

• Every result carries binding_status (seven values, from authentic to translation) and authentic_pdf_url where one exists. Applications with no text rendition (district and municipal promulgations, court rules, party-transparency decisions, council minutes, 1848–1940 gazettes) return a notice with the usable URL instead of failing

• Markdown over 40,000 bytes comes back as kind: outline, listing §/Artikel/Anlage sections or Part n of N windows; re-call with sections to fetch entries

• html and xml are never sliced. Over 40,000 bytes they come back as kind: link with no text, only byte_size and content_urls, which fetches the whole artifact in one request. Nearly every HTML rendition carries a 40–70 KB stylesheet and lands here, so read with markdown

ris_track_changes tool

• application (any of the 39 codes) plus changed_from/changed_to; include_deleted adds removals, which no other tool reports

• Records carry changed, published, and binding_status; deletion records set deleted: true with deleted_at

ris_list_reference tool

• topic selects one of 17 static tables: applications, courts, states, decision types and kinds, issuing bodies, ministries, collections, stages, changed-since intervals, section types, gazette parts, law types, district authorities, justiz subject areas, search syntax, and citation formats

• Returns summary and entries (value, label, details) with no upstream call; recovery hints across the other tools name the topic to read

ris://document/{application}/{documentNumber} resource

• text/markdown of one document, addressed by application + documentNumber copied from a search or lookup result; same content as ris_get_document with format: markdown

• Applications with no text rendition return a note pointing at the PDF or scan. Oversized text returns the outline without a sections selector, so use the tool to fetch an entry

Features

Built on @cyanheads/mcp-ts-core: stdio and Streamable HTTP transports, pluggable auth (none / jwt / oauth), swappable storage (in-memory, filesystem, Supabase, Cloudflare KV/R2/D1), structured logging with optional OpenTelemetry tracing.

RIS-specific:

• All 39 OGD applications: consolidated law, the federal, state, district, and municipal gazettes, 17 court and tribunal collections, the lawmaking pipeline, and sectoral announcements

• Citations route to deterministic upstream filters (section plus title, gazette number, Geschäftszahl, Sammlungsnummer) rather than keyword search

• Strict parameter allowlist: RIS silently ignores unknown parameters, so conditional filters are checked locally and only live-confirmed spellings go upstream

• Retries use a 1.5 s base delay for the rate-limited API, and an HTML page in place of JSON counts as a throttle signal

• Shared conventions: dates are YYYY-MM-DD; search tools page with page and page_size (10 or 20; default 20); a text filter must be non-blank, so omit it to leave the search unfiltered; court, application, state, and ministry codes come from ris_list_reference

• Tool descriptions are English, while titles, field values, and in-band RIS error messages stay German; legal terms such as Geschäftszahl and Rechtssatz are glossed in the descriptions

Agent-friendly output:

• Discriminated binding status: every record carries a typed label (authentic, consolidated_informational, historical_record, decision, preparatory, administrative_directive, translation), so callers branch on data, not string parsing

• Provenance: paged results report totalCount and truncated and echo what the server applied: appliedInForceAsOf, the gazette tier in servedApplication, and the changedFrom/changedTo window of a change feed

• Actionable recovery: typed error reasons (court_filter_mismatch, cross_tier_range, invalid_query, document_not_found, …) and zero-hit notices name the next call, whether a ris_list_reference topic, another search tool, or ris_lookup_citation

Getting started

Public Hosted Instance

A public instance is available at https://ris-austria.caseyjhand.com/mcp — no installation required. Point any MCP client at it via Streamable HTTP:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ris-austria-mcp-server": {
      "type": "streamable-http",
      "url": "https://ris-austria.caseyjhand.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Self-Hosted / Local

Add the server to your MCP client configuration with Bun:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ris-austria-mcp-server": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "bunx",
      "args": ["@cyanheads/ris-austria-mcp-server@latest"]
    }
  }
}

Or with npx (no Bun required):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ris-austria-mcp-server": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@cyanheads/ris-austria-mcp-server@latest"]
    }
  }
}

Or with Docker:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ris-austria-mcp-server": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "docker",
      "args": [
        "run", "-i", "--rm",
        "-e", "MCP_TRANSPORT_TYPE=stdio",
        "ghcr.io/cyanheads/ris-austria-mcp-server:latest"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Add any configuration variables under an "env" key for bunx/npx, or as additional -e NAME=value arguments for Docker.

For Streamable HTTP, set the transport and start the server:

MCP_TRANSPORT_TYPE=http MCP_HTTP_PORT=3010 bun run start:http
# Server listens at http://localhost:3010/mcp

Prerequisites

• Bun v1.4.0 or higher (or Node.js v24+).

• No API key: the RIS OGD API is keyless.

Installation

1. Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/cyanheads/ris-austria-mcp-server.git

2. Navigate into the directory:

cd ris-austria-mcp-server

3. Install dependencies and build:

bun install
bun run rebuild

4. Add to your MCP client configuration file:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ris-austria-mcp-server": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/ris-austria-mcp-server/dist/index.js"],
      "env": {
        "MCP_TRANSPORT_TYPE": "stdio",
        "MCP_LOG_LEVEL": "info"
      }
    }
  }
}

Configuration

See .env.example for the full list of optional overrides.

Running the server

Local development

• Build and run:

  # One-time build
  bun run rebuild
  
  # Run the built server
  bun run start:stdio
  # or
  bun run start:http

• Run checks and tests:

  bun run devcheck   # Lint, format, typecheck, security
  bun run test       # Vitest test suite
  bun run lint:mcp   # Validate MCP definitions against spec

Docker

docker build -t ris-austria-mcp-server .
docker run --rm -p 3010:3010 ris-austria-mcp-server

The Dockerfile defaults to HTTP transport, stateless session mode, and logs to /var/log/ris-austria-mcp-server. OpenTelemetry peer dependencies are installed by default; build with --build-arg OTEL_ENABLED=false to omit them.

Project structure

Development guide

See CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md for development guidelines and architectural rules. The short version:

• Handlers throw, framework catches — no try/catch in tool logic

• Use ctx.log for request-scoped logging, ctx.state for tenant-scoped storage

• Register new tools and resources via createApp() in src/index.ts

• Wrap the RIS API: validate raw → normalize to domain type → return output schema; never fabricate missing fields

Contributing

Issues are welcome. Run checks and tests before submitting:

bun run devcheck
bun run test

License

Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE for details.

RIS OGD data is CC BY 4.0 (attribution: RIS, Bundeskanzleramt Österreich). The underlying legal texts are copyright-free official works. Only the authentic, amtssignierte gazette wording is legally binding — consolidated RIS text is informational.