Ollama Web Search MCP

A small, resilient STDIO MCP server for Ollama Cloud's official Web Search and Web Fetch APIs.

It is designed for LiteLLM, Claude Desktop/Cowork, Codex, Cline, and other MCP clients.

Tools

Related MCP server: Ollama Web Search

Why this wrapper?

• Bounded retries for transient failures and rate limits

• Configurable timeouts

• Input and URL validation

• Partial success in search_and_fetch

• Safe error messages that do not expose the API key

• Small dependency surface, tests, and CI

Requirements

• Python 3.11+

• An Ollama API key from ollama.com

• uvx (recommended) or pip

Quick start

export OLLAMA_API_KEY="your-key"
uvx --from https://github.com/me3o2024/ollama-websearch-mcp/archive/refs/tags/v1.0.0.tar.gz ollama-websearch-mcp

LiteLLM UI: STDIO configuration

Add a new MCP server and paste:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ollama-websearch": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": [
        "--from",
        "https://github.com/me3o2024/ollama-websearch-mcp/archive/refs/tags/v1.0.0.tar.gz",
        "ollama-websearch-mcp"
      ],
      "env": {
        "OLLAMA_API_KEY": "your-ollama-api-key"
      }
    }
  }
}

Put the real key in env. ${OLLAMA_API_KEY} is not expanded here — LiteLLM interpolates ${...} placeholders in HTTP headers, not in the env block of a stdio server. A placeholder is passed to the subprocess verbatim, so the server sees the literal text ${OLLAMA_API_KEY} and fails with OLLAMA_API_KEY is required.

The LiteLLM container must have uvx installed and outbound HTTPS access to ollama.com and github.com. The URL above is a source archive, which needs no git — see the note below if you would rather install from a git+https:// URL.

Prefer a git+https:// URL?

It works, but only where git is installed: uvx shells out to git to resolve it, and minimal containers often ship without it. Either add git to the image:

RUN apk add --no-cache git

or keep using the source-archive URL, which has no such dependency.

git+https://github.com/me3o2024/ollama-websearch-mcp.git@v1.0.0

Other MCP clients

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ollama-websearch": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": [
        "--from",
        "https://github.com/me3o2024/ollama-websearch-mcp/archive/refs/tags/v1.0.0.tar.gz",
        "ollama-websearch-mcp"
      ],
      "env": {
        "OLLAMA_API_KEY": "your-key"
      }
    }
  }
}

Optional settings

Local development

python -m venv .venv
. .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ".[dev]"
ruff check .
pytest

Privacy

Search queries and URLs are sent from your MCP host to Ollama Cloud. The GitHub repository is only the source of the code; it does not receive your searches. Do not place confidential information, credentials, or customer data in web-search queries.

API basis

This project uses Ollama's official endpoints:

• POST https://ollama.com/api/web_search

• POST https://ollama.com/api/web_fetch

See the official Ollama Web Search documentation.

License

MIT