enable-nz-mcp

A public, hosted MCP server that exposes the content of enable.co.nz as searchable tools, connectable from Copilot Studio, VS Code Copilot, Claude Desktop, or any MCP client.

This is a personal portfolio project. It is not affiliated with Enable New Zealand or any employer, and reads only publicly available content from a public website.

• Server: https://enable-nz-mcp.duckdns.org/mcp (Streamable HTTP)

• Health check: https://enable-nz-mcp.duckdns.org/health

Architecture

GitHub Actions (weekly cron)
  └─ crawl enable.co.nz → build index.db.new
     └─ rsync over SSH → droplet:/opt/enable-nz-mcp/data/index.db.new
        └─ atomic mv → index.db

DigitalOcean droplet (Ubuntu 24.04, Sydney)
  ├─ Caddy  → TLS termination + reverse proxy on enable-nz-mcp.duckdns.org
  └─ pm2    → node dist/server.js  (port 8081, localhost only)
                └─ opens a fresh SQLite read connection per query

The server never caches the index in memory — every tool call opens a fresh readonly connection against index.db on disk. A weekly crawl rebuilds the index and swaps it in with a single atomic mv, so the index refreshes with zero downtime and no restart.

Read-only in every direction: the crawler only reads enable.co.nz, and the MCP tools only read the local SQLite index. No write operations of any kind.

Related MCP server: MCP Knowledge Base Server

Tools

search_enable_nz

Full-text search across enable.co.nz.

Returns matching pages ranked by relevance, each with url, title, section, and a highlighted snippet.

get_page

Retrieve one page's full text by URL.

Returns url, title, section, description, content, and crawled_at. Content over ~15,000 characters is truncated, with truncated: true in the response.

list_sections

No input. Lists the site's top-level sections with page counts, and the index's crawled_at timestamp — useful for orienting before a search, or checking how fresh the data is.

Example queries

Once connected, ask your MCP client things like:

• "Search enable.co.nz for wheelchair funding information."

• "What sections does the enable.co.nz index cover?"

• "Get the full content of https://www.enable.co.nz/services and summarise it."

Connecting an MCP client

Copilot Studio

1. Open your agent → Tools → Add a tool → New tool → Model Context Protocol.

2. Server name: enable-nz-mcp (or anything you like — this is just a label).

3. Server URL: https://enable-nz-mcp.duckdns.org/mcp

4. Authentication: No authentication (leave as-is unless the server has API_KEY set, in which case choose an API key/bearer auth option and supply it).

5. Create → Copilot Studio connects over Streamable HTTP (the only transport it supports since it dropped SSE in August 2025) and lists search_enable_nz, get_page, and list_sections. Add the tool to your agent and test with a prompt like "search enable.co.nz for wheelchair funding".

VS Code Copilot

1. Open the Command Palette → MCP: Add Server.

2. Choose HTTP and enter https://enable-nz-mcp.duckdns.org/mcp.

3. VS Code will list search_enable_nz, get_page, and list_sections as available tools once connected.

Claude Desktop

1. Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector.

2. URL: https://enable-nz-mcp.duckdns.org/mcp.

3. Claude will negotiate the Streamable HTTP transport automatically.

Any other MCP client

Point it at https://enable-nz-mcp.duckdns.org/mcp using the Streamable HTTP transport. If API_KEY is set on the server, send Authorization: Bearer <key>.

Local development

npm ci
cp .env.example .env        # edit as needed

npm run crawl                # builds data/index.db.new
mv data/index.db.new data/index.db

npm run dev                  # starts the server with tsx, reading .env

Test the running server with MCP Inspector:

npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector
# connect to http://127.0.0.1:8081/mcp

Or smoke-test by hand:

curl http://127.0.0.1:8081/health

curl -X POST http://127.0.0.1:8081/mcp \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Accept: application/json, text/event-stream" \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/list"}'

Run the test suite:

npm test

Deployment

The server runs on an existing DigitalOcean droplet under its own unprivileged system user (mcpsvc), isolated from other services on the same box — mcpsvc has no sudo and no read access outside /opt/enable-nz-mcp. See deploy/ecosystem.config.cjs for the pm2 process config and deploy/Caddyfile.example for the reverse-proxy block.

Both pm2 and Caddy config changes need root, so mcpsvc can go no further than pm2 save on its own — an administrator has to run pm2 startup (to persist the process across reboots) and install/reload the Caddy site block. Rate limiting is not currently applied at the Caddy layer: it requires the third-party caddy-ratelimit plugin, which isn't in this box's Caddy build.

The .github/workflows/refresh-index.yml workflow re-crawls the site weekly (Sunday 02:00 UTC, or manually via workflow_dispatch), gates on a minimum page count/size, and deploys the new index via rsync + an atomic mv over SSH. It needs three repository secrets: DEPLOY_SSH_KEY, DEPLOY_HOST, DEPLOY_USER — using a dedicated deploy keypair restricted via a command= directive in authorized_keys so it can only run the rsync/mv, not an arbitrary shell.

Out of scope for v1

• Embeddings / semantic search (keyword search via SQLite FTS5 is sufficient for one marketing site)

• Headless-browser rendering

• Multi-site support

• Write operations of any kind

• User-level auth or per-tenant isolation