docshelf-mcp

Put your manuals on a shelf, hand the AI the index.

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       MCP server for AI-friendly doc shelves

An MCP server that turns a folder of PDFs and Markdown into a chat-project-friendly document collection: AI agents see a single INDEX.md and pull individual sections by raw GitHub URL on demand — instead of choking on a 4 MB datasheet.

Why?

You have 30 hardware manuals, or 200 cooking recipes, or a stack of research PDFs.

You want Claude / ChatGPT / whatever to be able to answer questions across them — but:

• ❌ You can't dump 80 MB of PDFs into a chat project. It won't fit, and you'd burn the context window even if it did.

• ❌ You can manually copy-paste the relevant pages, but only after you remember which manual mentioned the thing you need.

• ❌ Long files mean retrieval is wasteful — the model loads the whole RouterOS guide just to answer a question about VLANs.

docshelf-mcp solves it like this:

1. You drop a PDF onto the shelf.

2. The shelf converts it to Markdown, splits big files chapter-by-chapter, and regenerates a navigation INDEX.md.

3. You commit and push to a public GitHub repo.

4. Add only INDEX.md to your Claude project. When the model needs a section, it fetches it via raw.githubusercontent.com.

Result: a 5 KB index pointing at a 50 MB collection. The model reads exactly the chapter it needs.

📦 Install

From PyPI (once the first tagged release is published):

# uv (recommended)
uv pip install docshelf-mcp

# or plain pip
pip install docshelf-mcp

Or straight from main (always-latest, no PyPI required):

pip install "git+https://github.com/ignatenkofi/docshelf-mcp"

Optional high-quality PDF engine (pulls ~2 GB of PyTorch — only if you need it):

pip install "docshelf-mcp[high-quality]"

📋 Project Prompt

Drop this into the Custom Instructions of any Claude project that consumes a docshelf-style INDEX.md:

This project uses the docshelf pattern. INDEX.md is the entry point. When answering: read INDEX → fetch ONLY the needed section file via its GitHub raw URL (use WebFetch / fetch / curl). Don't load full source files into context. For large manuals split into chapters, follow INDEX → chapter SUBINDEX → section file.

Medium (~150 words) and full (~400 words) versions, plus how-to snippets for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, and the Anthropic API, live in docs/PROJECT_PROMPT.md.

Quickstart (Python library)

from docshelf_mcp import Shelf

shelf = Shelf("~/Documents/my-homelab-docs").init(
    name="My HomeLab Docs",
    remote="https://github.com/me/my-homelab-docs",
    default_categories=["routers", "switches", "psu", "motherboards"],
)

shelf.add_document(
    "~/Downloads/MIKROTIK_RouterOS.pdf",
    category="routers",
    title="Mikrotik RouterOS — full manual",
    description="Official RouterOS reference, split by chapter.",
)
# → docs/routers/mikrotik-routeros-full-manual.md  +  docs/routers/.../001-..md, 002-..md, ...
# → INDEX.md is regenerated automatically.

Then in the shelf directory: git add . && git commit -m "docs: add RouterOS" && git push.

In your Claude project, attach only INDEX.md. Done.

Quickstart (MCP server)

1. Add to Claude Desktop

Edit ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json (macOS) or %APPDATA%/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json (Windows):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "docshelf": {
      "command": "docshelf-mcp",
      "env": {
        "DOCSHELF_ROOT": "/Users/me/Documents/my-homelab-docs"
      }
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop. You now have six new tools available:

2. Add to Claude Code

claude mcp add docshelf -- docshelf-mcp
# Optional: set the default shelf
claude mcp add docshelf --env DOCSHELF_ROOT=/path/to/shelf -- docshelf-mcp

3. Test from the command line

# Sanity check — should print the server version then wait on stdin
docshelf-mcp

The shelf layout

my-shelf/
├── .docshelf.json        ← shelf metadata: name, remote, category order
├── INDEX.md              ← auto-generated navigation (your chat-project file)
├── .gitignore
└── docs/
    ├── routers/
    │   ├── .meta.json    ← per-document title/description overrides
    │   ├── mikrotik-routeros.md       (full document, lightly cleaned)
    │   └── mikrotik-routeros/         (auto-split sections)
    │       ├── 001-overview.md
    │       ├── 002-bridging.md
    │       └── 003-firewall.md
    └── switches/
        └── cudy-gs1010pe.md

Everything in docs/ is committed; everything is fetchable via raw URL once you push to GitHub.

How splitting works

A document is split when both conditions hold:

1. UTF-8 size > 50 KB (configurable via .docshelf.json:split_threshold_bytes).

2. The document has at least two ## (H2) headings.

The splitter:

• Cleans PDF-extraction noise (collapses runaway blank lines, demotes CLI dumps mistaken for H1s).

• Slices on H2 boundaries.

• Names files NNN-<slug>.md so they sort naturally and survive title changes.

• Wipes the previous split directory before regenerating — fully idempotent.

If you want to keep a document whole, pass split=False.

Examples

See the examples/ directory for three concrete use cases:

• examples/homelab/ — original use case, hardware manuals for a home lab.

• examples/recipes/ — a cookbook with one recipe per file.

• examples/research-papers/ — academic PDFs with abstracts in .meta.json.

Each example shows the directory layout and the INDEX.md you'd end up with.

Optional: high-quality PDF conversion

The default engine (pymupdf4llm) is fast and good enough for ~95% of technical documents. For papers with complex tables, math, or scanned content, install the marker-pdf backend:

pip install "docshelf-mcp[high-quality]"

Then pass quality="high":

shelf.add_document("paper.pdf", category="research", title="...", quality="high")

⚠️ marker-pdf pulls in PyTorch (~2 GB) and is significantly slower (10–60 s per document on CPU). The library import is deferred — if you don't use quality="high", the dependency is never loaded.

FAQ

Why GitHub raw URLs and not embeddings / RAG? Because it's dead simple, costs nothing to host, and the AI is already good at chasing links. You can layer embedding search on top later if you want — the on-disk shape is a normal git repo.

Does this work with private repos? Not for the raw-URL trick — raw.githubusercontent.com won't serve them without auth. The local search tool works fine on private shelves; you just lose the "AI fetches sections directly" benefit. Make the doc repo public (separate from your code repo).

Do I have to use GitHub? No. The shelf is just a directory. If you don't set a github_remote, INDEX.md still gets generated — entries just won't have URLs. You can host the static files anywhere that serves raw text (S3, Cloudflare R2, GitLab raw, Gitea, …) and post-process URLs yourself.

Does it edit the source PDFs? No. PDFs are converted on add_document and the source is left in place. The shelf only writes inside its own directory.

What about non-English documents? Slugify is Unicode-aware (NFKD-normalized, with \w under re.UNICODE). Cyrillic / CJK titles slug down to ASCII-ish forms; the body Markdown is preserved as-is.

Can I use it without MCP? Yes — from docshelf_mcp import Shelf and use the class directly. See docs/USAGE.md.

Limitations

• Public GitHub only for the raw-URL trick (or whatever public static host you wire up).

• Single repo per shelf. If you outgrow one repo, run multiple shelves and attach multiple INDEX.mds.

• Heuristic splitting. The PDF→Markdown extract isn't always clean enough to split cleanly. For pathological cases (some 4+ MB datasheets), keep the file whole and rely on docshelf_search.

• No automatic git commit. Tools regenerate INDEX.md on disk, but the caller (you, or an agent) is responsible for git add / commit / push. This is intentional — staying out of git's way keeps the tool safe to call from agents.

Demo

A short walkthrough video / GIF is planned: https://github.com/ignatenkofi/docshelf-mcp/blob/main/docs/demo.md (coming soon)

Architecture

For a deeper dive, see docs/ARCHITECTURE.md — module layout, data flow, design rationale.

Contributing

Bug reports and PRs welcome. To set up a dev env:

git clone https://github.com/ignatenkofi/docshelf-mcp
cd docshelf-mcp
uv pip install -e ".[dev]"
ruff check src tests
pytest -v

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Origin

docshelf-mcp started life as a 350-line Python script (homelab-encyclopedia.py) that managed a single homelab manuals repo. The split / index / clean logic is the same code, generalised to work for any category-organised document collection.