lemon-manuals-mcp

Prototype MCP server (streamable HTTP, stateless) for the self-hosted LEMON/CHARM car-repair-manual archive (home-lab repo kubernetes/apps/lemon-manuals/).

Tools:

• list_makes — all makes with vehicle counts and year ranges

• search_vehicles — free-text over make/model/engine/year → grouped drivetrains, variants, and all source manuals

• get_page — opaque encoded site path → normalized markdown, with tree depth and byte controls

• search_manual — persistent FTS5 search over titles and/or body text, deduplicated by document content

• get_image — opaque encoded image path → validated MCP image block (2 MB maximum; never truncated)

All returned paths are opaque encoded tokens. Pass them to get_page, search_manual, or get_image exactly as returned; never decode or rebuild them. search_manual defaults to mode: "both"; title and body are also available. Results contain a body-text snippet, an also_under list for duplicate tree placements, and parsed from/through applicability when the publisher labels it. Image-only pages are identified explicitly.

Browse/search is answered locally from the databases' index.json files (~305k vehicles, ~200ms load); page content is fetched from the lemon-website server and converted with turndown. Relative and /hyperlink/... references are normalized to absolute encoded site paths that can be passed directly back to the tools.

Manual full-text data lives in data/manual-search.sqlite by default. A first search tree-walks and persists an unindexed manual. mode: "title" only fetches matching leaves; body/both completes the manual's body index and can therefore be slow on first use. Production should prebuild the index:

# One or more opaque vehicle roots (recommended for incremental rollout)
bun run index-manuals -- '/Volkswagen/2005/Touareg%20%287LA%29%20V8-4.2L%20%28BHX%29/'

# No arguments indexes every isComplete vehicle. This is a full-corpus job.
bun run index-manuals

Setup

The index files are gitignored (147MB, re-fetchable from the cluster):

kubectl -n lemon-manuals exec deploy/lemon-website -- cat /data/charm/index.json > data/charm-index.json
kubectl -n lemon-manuals exec deploy/lemon-website -- cat /data/lemon/index.json > data/lemon-index.json

The server needs HTTP reach to lemon-website. For local dev:

kubectl -n lemon-manuals port-forward deploy/lemon-website 18080:8080

Env: LEMON_BASE_URL (default http://127.0.0.1:18080), LEMON_DATA_DIR (default ./data), and LEMON_SEARCH_DB (default $LEMON_DATA_DIR/manual-search.sqlite). The search database directory must be writable and persistent if lazy indexing is enabled.

Related MCP server: docs-mcp

Run / register

With Bun available on PATH, either installed directly or through an activated mise environment:

bun src/index.ts                 # HTTP server on :8787 (/mcp, /healthz)
bun test/client.ts               # end-to-end smoke (needs port-forward)
bun run live-corpus              # one complete manual/corpus/decade
bun test                         # hermetic regression suite
bun run typecheck
claude mcp add --transport http lemon-manuals http://127.0.0.1:8787/mcp

The pages.mtbl direct-read option (vendored oxidized-mtbl crate in kelchm/lemon-website) can eventually replace the HTML ingestion round-trip.