Asta MCP Servers

MCP wrappers for Allen AI's Asta research tools — making CLI-only capabilities accessible to any chatbot or AI agent via the Model Context Protocol.

Why This Exists

Allen AI's Asta ecosystem provides powerful research tools, but some are only available as CLI commands (via asta-plugins). This project wraps those CLI-only tools as MCP servers, so any MCP-compatible chatbot or agent can use them — not just agents with Bash access.

Already covered by official MCP servers (not duplicated here):

• Paper search, citations, authors, snippets — use the official Asta Scientific Corpus MCP at asta-tools.allen.ai/mcp/v1

• Experiment execution — use Panda's built-in MCP server

This project wraps what has no MCP equivalent:

• Document collection management (asta-documents CLI)

• Deep literature search, report generation, PDF extraction, theory synthesis (Paper Finder API + Remote OCR API)

Architecture

                        +-------------------+
                        |    MCP Client     |
                        | (ChatGPT, Claude, |
                        |  Cursor, etc.)    |
                        +--------+----------+
                                 | stdio
                    +------------+------------+
                    |                         |
           +-------v--------+       +--------v-------+
           |  asta-library   |       |  asta-reports  |
           |   (5 tools)     |       |   (4 tools)    |
           +-------+--------+       +--+----------+--+
                   |                    |          |
                   v                    v          v
           +-------------+      +----------+ +--------+
           |asta-documents|      |Paper     | |Remote  |
           |CLI (local)   |      |Finder API| |OCR API |
           +------+------+      +-----+----+ +---+----+
                  |                    |          |
            Local filesystem     Asta Gateway
                            (asta-gateway.apps.allenai.org)

Quick Start

1. Install

uv pip install git+https://github.com/maxwellsdm1867/asta-mcp.git

# Or with pip
pip install git+https://github.com/maxwellsdm1867/asta-mcp.git

Prerequisites: Python 3.11+

2. Authenticate (required for asta-reports)

# Option A: Use the Asta CLI (install from https://github.com/allenai/asta-plugins)
asta auth login

# Option B: Set a token directly
export ASTA_TOKEN="your-bearer-token"

Note: asta-library works locally without auth. asta-reports requires auth for the Paper Finder and OCR APIs.

3. Configure your MCP client (see Configuration below)

Servers

asta-library — 5 tools

MCP wrapper for the asta-documents CLI. Manages a local collection of research documents with search, tagging, and metadata.

CLI equivalent: asta documents ... (requires Bash access) This MCP server: makes it available to any MCP client

Example prompt: "Save that paper to my library with the tags 'RAG' and 'NLP', then show me everything tagged 'RAG'."

Requires: asta-resource-repository (pip install asta-resource-repository). Falls back to uvx if not installed.

asta-reports — 4 tools

MCP wrapper for the Asta Paper Finder API and Remote OCR API. Provides deep literature search, structured report generation, PDF text extraction, and hypothesis synthesis.

CLI equivalents: asta literature find ..., asta pdf-extraction remote ... (require Bash access) This MCP server: makes them available to any MCP client, plus adds report generation and theory synthesis

Example prompt: "Generate a literature review on transformer efficiency methods with up to 20 papers, then extract the text from ~/Downloads/flash-attention.pdf."

What to Use for What

Configuration

Claude Code

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "asta-library": {
      "command": "asta-library-mcp"
    },
    "asta-reports": {
      "command": "asta-reports-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Cursor

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "asta-library": {
      "command": "asta-library-mcp",
      "args": []
    },
    "asta-reports": {
      "command": "asta-reports-mcp",
      "args": []
    }
  }
}

Generic MCP Client

asta-library-mcp        # Document collection management
asta-reports-mcp        # Deep search, reports, PDF, theories

# Or as Python modules:
python -m asta_library
python -m asta_reports

Environment Variables

Development

git clone https://github.com/maxwellsdm1867/asta-mcp.git
cd asta-mcp
uv venv && source .venv/bin/activate
uv pip install -e ".[all,dev]"
pytest tests/ -v
ruff check .

Project Structure

asta-mcp/
  asta_library/        # Local document management (5 tools)
    server.py
    auth.py
  asta_reports/        # Deep search, reports, PDF, theories (4 tools)
    server.py
    auth.py
  tests/
  pyproject.toml

Built with FastMCP 3.x.

License

Apache License 2.0

Credits

• Allen Institute for AI — creators of the Asta research ecosystem

• Asta Project — the platform these servers extend

• FastMCP — the Python MCP framework

• Model Context Protocol — the open protocol enabling AI agent tool use