mdrag

Give any local Markdown folder a semantic-search MCP server. Runs entirely offline.

Turn ~/Desktop/sales/, ~/Desktop/notes/, or any directory full of Markdown files into a searchable knowledge base that Claude Code, Cursor, Cline, and other MCP clients can query with natural-language questions.

Features

Storage & indexing

• 🗂 Multi-vault — one MCP server manages many doc folders, each a separate "vault"
• 📦 Self-contained — each vault's vector DB lives inside the folder (.mdrag/), move it anywhere
• ⚡ Incremental indexing — only re-embed files whose mtime changed
• 👀 Auto-reindex on save — mdrag serve watches every registered vault with watchdog, 1.5s debounce; new/edited/deleted/moved .md files are picked up with no manual reindex, no cron
• 🙈 .mdragignore — gitignore-style file at the vault root excludes drafts, archives, or whole directories from the index

Retrieval quality

• ✂️ Chunk-level retrieval — long docs are split by headings (sliding-window fallback at 600 chars / 80 overlap) so mid-doc content stays findable; each doc also gets an "overview" chunk for broad queries
• 🔀 Hybrid search — dense vector retrieval fused with BM25 keyword matching via best-rank fusion, so specific terms and semantic intent both get through
• 🎯 Rare-term boost — queries containing digit strings (e.g. "38 种字段") switch to a BM25-priority fusion so exact-match lookups aren't buried by vector results
• 🌐 Cross-lingual query expansion — comparison-style queries ("区别", "对比", "compare", "vs") get auto-expanded with bilingual synonyms before embedding, improving recall on mixed-language corpora
• 🧠 Any embedding model — default is multilingual paraphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2 (handles Chinese + English + 50 more); swap in any sentence-transformers model

Stability

• 🔐 File-locking — concurrent CLI + watcher reindexes on the same vault are serialized via filelock, preventing LanceDB corruption
• 📋 Schema versioning — meta.json in each .mdrag/ dir tracks schema version and model; mismatches are caught early with an actionable error
• 🩺 mdrag doctor — one command to check everything: Python, registry, per-vault health, model cache, disk usage, PATH; paste the output into bug reports
• 📡 Watcher health in MCP — list_vaults shows a ⚠️ if a vault's auto-reindex is failing (consecutive errors + message), instead of silently serving stale data

Interface

• 🔒 Fully local — no API keys, no cloud; embeddings run on your machine
• 🛠 MCP tools — list_vaults, search, get_doc, list_tags exposed to Claude Code / Cursor / Cline over stdio
• 💡 Match explainability — each search result includes match_reason ("vector+bm25", "bm25 (rare-term)", "bm25 only", "vector only") so AI clients can explain or re-rank
• 📏 Quality eval harness — mdrag eval compares any set of indexes on a YAML query suite; Recall@K, MRR, per-query ranking diff
• 🏷 Frontmatter-aware — title, tags, summary from YAML frontmatter are indexed and searchable

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Installation

pip install mdrag

Requires Python ≥ 3.10.

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Quickstart (3 steps)

Let's say Bob has a folder ~/Desktop/sales/ full of meeting notes, proposals, and competitor research in Markdown.

1. Register the MCP server (once, globally)

claude mcp add mdrag --scope user -- mdrag serve

This tells Claude Code "there's an MCP server called mdrag — launch it with mdrag serve when needed". You'll only do this once per machine.

2. Register your doc folder as a vault

mdrag vault add sales ~/Desktop/sales

The first time you run this, a ~100MB embedding model downloads (once), then all .md files under ~/Desktop/sales/ get indexed. A .mdrag/ subfolder is created inside sales/ to hold the vector database.

3. Use it from Claude Code

Open Claude Code in any project. Ask:

"Use the mdrag MCP to search my sales vault for the Q4 pipeline review"

Claude will call mcp__mdrag__search(vault="sales", query="Q4 pipeline review") and return the top matching documents.

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Adding another folder

No new MCP config needed — just register another vault:

mdrag vault add marketing ~/Desktop/marketing
mdrag vault add notes ~/Documents/notes

All vaults are visible through the same MCP server. Claude calls:

mcp__mdrag__list_vaults()                          → see all vaults
mcp__mdrag__search(vault="marketing", query="...")
mcp__mdrag__search(vault="notes", query="...")

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CLI reference

mdrag serve                          Start the MCP stdio server
mdrag vault add NAME PATH            Register a directory and index it
mdrag vault list                     Show all vaults
mdrag vault info NAME                Show vault details
mdrag vault reindex NAME [--full]    Re-index (incremental or full)
mdrag vault remove NAME [--purge]    Unregister (and optionally delete .mdrag/)
mdrag search VAULT QUERY [-k N]      Search a vault from the shell (debugging)
mdrag eval QUERIES INDEX_SPECS...    Compare retrieval quality across indexes

mdrag search runs the same hybrid retrieval as the MCP search tool — useful for verifying a reindex or debugging without an MCP client. Add --json for machine-readable output, --tags a,b to filter.

Common options:

• --model MODEL_NAME on vault add — pick a different embedding model
• --no-index on vault add — skip initial indexing (useful when first adding, want to index later)
• --full on vault reindex — rebuild from scratch (required after changing the model)

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MCP tools exposed

When mdrag serve is running, these tools are available to the AI client:

Tool	Purpose
list_vaults()	List all registered vaults with their stats
search(vault, query, top_k=5, tags="")	Semantic search within a vault; returns the best-matching chunk per doc with heading_path and chunk_text
get_doc(vault, path)	Read the full content of a document
list_tags(vault)	List all frontmatter tags in a vault with counts

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Frontmatter (optional)

If your Markdown files have YAML frontmatter, mdrag will use it:

---
title: Q4 Pipeline Review
tags: [sales, forecast, 2026-q4]
summary: Overview of deals in play for Q4 2026.
---

# Q4 Pipeline Review
...

• title — used as the result title (falls back to filename)
• tags — searchable via the tags parameter of search
• summary — shown in search results

No frontmatter? It still works — mdrag auto-generates a preview from the file body.

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Embedding models

Language	Recommended model	Notes
Multilingual (default)	paraphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2	~120MB, handles Chinese + English + 50 more
Chinese-only	BAAI/bge-small-zh-v1.5	~100MB, higher recall on pure Chinese
English-only	BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5	~100MB, higher recall on pure English
Higher accuracy	BAAI/bge-base-zh-v1.5 or -en	~400MB, noticeably slower

Change the model when registering a vault:

mdrag vault add notes ~/Documents/notes --model BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5

After changing the model on an existing vault (edit ~/.mdrag/vaults.yaml), run a full rebuild:

mdrag vault reindex notes --full

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How it works

 ┌────────────────────┐        ┌──────────────────────┐
 │ ~/Desktop/sales/   │        │ ~/.mdrag/         │
 │   meeting-01.md    │        │   vaults.yaml        │  ← registry
 │   proposal.md      │        └──────────────────────┘
 │   .mdrag/       │ ← LanceDB vector store (per-vault)
 │     docs.lance/    │
 └──────────┬─────────┘
            │
            │ mdrag serve
            ▼
 ┌──────────────────────────┐
 │   FastMCP stdio server   │
 │   tools:                 │
 │     search / get_doc /   │
 │     list_vaults /        │
 │     list_tags            │
 └──────────┬───────────────┘
            │ MCP protocol (stdio / JSON-RPC)
            ▼
     Claude Code / Cursor / Cline

• Vault registry is at ~/.mdrag/vaults.yaml
• Each vault's vector database lives inside the vault directory at .mdrag/ — self-contained, portable
• Embeddings use sentence-transformers, stored in LanceDB
• MCP server is built on FastMCP

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FAQ

How do I update the index after editing files?

You don't have to. When mdrag serve is running (i.e. Claude Code / Cursor are connected), it watches every registered vault and auto-reindexes on save. A short debounce batches rapid edits.

If serve isn't running, run manual incremental:

mdrag vault reindex sales

Only files with changed mtime are re-embedded.

How do I exclude files from the index?

Put a .mdragignore file at the root of your vault, using gitignore syntax:

# Example: drafts, archives, big log exports
drafts/
archive/**
**/sales-log-*.md

Takes effect on the next index run (auto-watch picks up the change too).

Does it support PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, etc.?

Not directly — mdrag only indexes .md. This is by design: conversion is a messy, format-specific problem, and keeping the core focused on Markdown keeps the index predictable.

Use the companion tool mdpack to convert a directory of mixed-format docs to clean Markdown, then point mdrag at the output:

pip install mdpack
brew install pandoc            # needed for DOCX

mdpack convert ~/Desktop/reports                   # writes ~/Desktop/reports/converted/
mdrag vault add reports ~/Desktop/reports/converted

mdpack mirrors the source directory, injects source/converter/converted_at frontmatter so mdrag can trace results back to the original file, and strips inline base64 images (which would otherwise inflate .md files to multi-MB and break chunking). Supports .docx, .xlsx, .csv today; PDF / PPTX / HTML in the 0.2 roadmap.

For one-off conversions without installing mdpack, pandoc still works:

pandoc meeting.docx -o docs/meeting.md --wrap=none

Model download is slow / fails

If you're in China, set a HuggingFace mirror:

export HF_ENDPOINT=https://hf-mirror.com
mdrag vault add sales ~/Desktop/sales

Where is the vector data stored?

• Vault registry: ~/.mdrag/vaults.yaml
• Each vault's vectors: <vault_path>/.mdrag/docs.lance/

Can I share a vault across machines?

Yes — the .mdrag/ folder is self-contained. Sync the whole vault directory (via Dropbox, rsync, git-lfs, whatever) and mdrag vault add <name> <path> on the other machine. No re-indexing needed as long as the embedding model matches.

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Integrations

Claude Code

claude mcp add mdrag --scope user -- mdrag serve

Or manually in ~/.mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mdrag": {
      "command": "mdrag",
      "args": ["serve"]
    }
  }
}

Cursor / Cline / other MCP clients

Add the same stdio command to your client's MCP configuration. The command is mdrag serve — it communicates over stdio following the MCP protocol.

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Development

git clone https://github.com/andyleimc-source/mdrag
cd mdrag
python -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -e .[dev]
.venv/bin/pytest

Try the example vault shipped in the repo:

mdrag vault add demo ./examples/sample-vault
mdrag vault list

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License

MIT — do whatever you want with it.