riffado-mcp

An MCP server for the Riffado voice-recording archive (Plaud device → Riffado app): transcripts, AI summaries, key points, action items. Strictly read-only. Talks to the Riffado Postgres database directly (not the Riffado API), decrypts at-rest ciphertext in-process, and serves it over MCP — stdio for Claude Code, Streamable HTTP + OAuth for Claude Web/iOS.

Tools

riffado_search: two-stage, and the deep parameter

Search runs in two stages. Stage 1 scores the whole corpus against pre-normalized titles/summaries/key points/action items only (cheap, always in memory). Stage 2 fetches and scans transcript text, but only for the top-ranked stage-1 candidates (K = min(max(limit * 3, 30), 200)) — not the whole corpus. scope: "summary" stops after stage 1 (no transcript fetch at all); scope: "all" (default) and scope: "transcript" run stage 2 over the candidate set.

This means a term that appears only in one recording's transcript, and nowhere in any title/summary/key point/action item, may not surface unless that recording happens to rank in the top-K by cheap-field score. Pass deep: true to scan every recording's transcript that passes the from/to date filter instead of just the candidates — slower, and its cost scales with corpus size, so combine it with from/to when possible. The tool's response says explicitly when results were narrowed this way (i.e. whenever deep is false), so a client can tell a no-hit result from a real absence rather than assume one.

query is capped at 500 characters.

Also: resource riffado://index (markdown index), resource template riffado://recording/{id}, and prompt riffado_ask (carries the answering rules — cite date+title, quote verbatim, transcript beats AI summary, flag ASR misreads, never fill gaps from general knowledge).

Related MCP server: gilbert-mcp

Example questions

Things you can ask Claude once the server is connected:

• "What did I record yesterday?"

• "What action items came out of my recordings this week?"

• "Give me the transcript of my last call with Sarah." (paged in slices for long recordings)

• "How many recordings do I have, and what's my average recording length?"

• "Which of my recordings don't have a transcript yet?"

More complex, research-style questions Claude can answer by combining several tool calls (search → pull the matching recordings → read/quote transcripts):

• "Across all my calls with customer Acme, what's the recurring technical pain point they keep bringing up?"

• "What does customer Acme's current tool stack look like, based on everything they've mentioned across our calls?"

• "When does Acme's contract expire, and did we discuss a renewal date in any recent call?"

• "Do a deep search (deep: true) through all transcripts for 'Meier contract' — this might not show up in summaries — and tell me what was agreed."

• "Compare what customer X and customer Y said about pricing across all our calls with them — where do their objections differ?"

• "Build a timeline of everything discussed with Acme this quarter, with dates and direct quotes."

Environment variables

Numeric variables must be plain integers within their range — a value like 3000abc or 1.5 fails at startup instead of being silently truncated.

Health checks

GET /health is the one route auth never gates — liveness only: { status, timestamp }. GET /health/details adds session count, DB reachability and the cached recording count, and requires the same auth as every other route (shared token or OAuth).

/health is also exempt from rate limiting. Everything else is limited per client IP in 15-minute windows: 50 failed authentications (401s) lock that IP out with 429 for the rest of the window, even with a valid token; authenticated traffic is capped at 1000 requests; /register, /authorize and /token together at 30.

Quickstart: Claude Code (stdio)

npm install
npm run build

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "riffado": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/path/to/riffado-mcp/dist/index.js"],
      "env": {
        "DATABASE_URL": "postgresql://postgres:...@riffado-db:5432/riffado",
        "ENCRYPTION_KEY": "..."
      }
    }
  }
}

Quickstart: Claude Web / iOS (HTTP + OAuth)

1. Run the container with TRANSPORT=http, HTTP_PUBLIC_URL set to the public HTTPS URL, HTTP_AUTH_TOKEN set to a shared secret, and HTTP_TRUST_PROXY=1 if it sits behind a reverse proxy or Cloudflare Tunnel.

2. In Claude, add a custom connector pointing at https://riffado-mcp.example.com/mcp.

3. Claude opens the login page, which names the host it will redirect to (for Claude, claude.ai); paste the HTTP_AUTH_TOKEN value. Claude then holds a normal OAuth bearer token — the connector survives process restarts because OAuth state is persisted to HTTP_OAUTH_STATE_FILE. Rotating HTTP_AUTH_TOKEN revokes every issued OAuth token and registered client on the next start; connectors then log in again with the new value. Access tokens live 1 hour and are refreshed silently; a connector left idle for more than 90 days (refresh token lifetime) has to log in again.

Upgrade note: one-time re-login

The OAuth state file format changed (tokens are now stored only as SHA-256 hashes, version: 2). On the first start after upgrading, the old file is discarded and rewritten empty, so every connector has to log in once more with HTTP_AUTH_TOKEN. Clients registered with a redirect host outside HTTP_OAUTH_ALLOWED_REDIRECT_HOSTS are rejected from now on; if you use an OAuth client other than Claude or a loopback tool, add its callback host there.

Docker Compose example

services:
  riffado-mcp:
    image: ghcr.io/l480/riffado-mcp:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    read_only: true
    cap_drop: [ALL]
    security_opt: [no-new-privileges:true]
    user: "7333:7333"
    environment:
      TZ: Europe/Berlin
      DATABASE_URL: postgresql://postgres:...@riffado-db:5432/riffado
      ENCRYPTION_KEY: "..."
      HTTP_PUBLIC_URL: https://riffado-mcp.example.com
      HTTP_AUTH_TOKEN: "..."
      # Behind a reverse proxy / Cloudflare Tunnel (one hop). Omit when
      # clients connect to the container directly.
      HTTP_TRUST_PROXY: "1"
    volumes:
      - /opt/riffado-mcp/data:/app/data
    networks: [root_default]

/app/data must be a writable volume — the image runs --read-only otherwise, so it needs somewhere to persist oauth-state.json across container recreation.

Development

npm run lint          # eslint
npm run format:check  # prettier --check
npm run typecheck     # tsc --noEmit, src + test
npm test              # vitest, unit tests only
npm run build         # tsc -> dist/

Integration tests need a real Postgres:

docker compose -f docker-compose.test.yml up -d
TEST_DATABASE_URL=postgresql://postgres:postgres@localhost:5433/riffado_test \
  npm run test:integration
docker compose -f docker-compose.test.yml down

Performance

Search is two-stage: cheap fields (title/summary/key points/action items) rank the whole corpus first, then only the top candidates get their transcripts fetched and scanned — deep: true trades that speed for full recall by scanning every date-filtered recording's transcript instead, and is far slower by design. Headline number: a 3-term scope: "all" search at 20 000 recordings runs in ~175 ms (p50).

Full measured numbers and limitations: docs/performance.md. Harness + reproduction steps: bench/README.md.

Security notes

• Read-only, enforced by Postgres: the pool's session starts with default_transaction_read_only=on — a bug or prompt injection in a tool handler cannot mutate Riffado, because Postgres itself rejects the write.

• Use a dedicated read-only role anyway (defence in depth: a session can SET default_transaction_read_only=off, a role without write grants can't write regardless). The server only reads recordings, transcriptions and ai_enhancements:

  CREATE ROLE riffado_mcp LOGIN PASSWORD '...';
  GRANT CONNECT ON DATABASE riffado TO riffado_mcp;
  GRANT USAGE ON SCHEMA public TO riffado_mcp;
  GRANT SELECT ON recordings, transcriptions, ai_enhancements TO riffado_mcp;

  then DATABASE_URL=postgresql://riffado_mcp:...@riffado-db:5432/riffado.

• Encrypt the DB connection off-host: when Postgres is not on the same host or Docker network, add ?sslmode=require to DATABASE_URL (or verify-full with the server's CA), otherwise ciphertext and the credentials cross the network in the clear.

• No plaintext at rest, ever: recordings are decrypted in memory on each cache refresh (default TTL 60s) and never written to disk.

• No audio, no storage paths, no credentials, no other users' rows are exposed by any tool.

• Container runs rootless (7333:7333), --read-only, cap-drop: ALL.

License

MIT