HGB Basel — MCP Server

An MCP server that exposes the Historisches Grundbuch Basel (HGB) corpus for use with Claude and other MCP-compatible clients.

Architecture

hgb_full_*.xml  ──► build_db.py ──► hgb.db (SQLite + FTS5)
                                         │
                                    server.py  (mcp 2.0 MCPServer,
                                                streamable HTTP)
                                         │
                              http://<host>:8000/mcp

The 800 MB XML is parsed once into a ~100 MB SQLite database. The server then runs stateless queries against it (PRAGMA query_only).

The server targets mcp 2.0, which removed mcp.server.fastmcp — the high-level class is now MCPServer in mcp.server.mcpserver. requirements.txt pins the major version accordingly; the previous mcp[cli]>=1.0.0 floor meant a rebuild silently jumped major versions and broke the import.

The transport is streamable HTTP (/mcp), not the HTTP+SSE (/sse) this server used previously. SSE is deprecated, and its handshake hands the client an absolute /messages/ path computed from the app's own mount point — unreachable behind a reverse-proxy sub-path without rewriting the event stream in the proxy. Existing clients pointed at /sse must be repointed.

db.SCHEMA_SQL and db.TRIGGERS_SQL own the schema; build_db.py uses them, so the build and the tests cannot drift apart.

Setup

1. Install dependencies

cd mcp_server
pip install -r requirements.txt

2. Build the database

python build_db.py --xml ../hgb_full_26_05_29_05.xml --db hgb.db

This takes ~10 minutes and produces hgb.db. Run it once; repeat only when the XML changes.

3. Start the server

python server.py --db hgb.db --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8000

Each flag also has an environment variable — EOS_DB, EOS_HOST, EOS_PORT, EOS_HTTP_PATH — which the flags override. Importing server.py never reads sys.argv, so it is safe to import from tests or an ASGI loader.

--http-path (default /mcp) is the path the MCP endpoint is served at. Behind a reverse proxy, set it to the public path — see Reverse proxy.

4. Connect a client

Claude Code — the name and URL are positional; there is no --url flag:

claude mcp add --transport http hgb http://<server-ip>:8000/mcp -s user

-s user makes the server available in every project; -s project writes it to .mcp.json to share with a repository; the default local scope is just you, in the current project. claude mcp list then reports the connection status.

Claude Desktop, Cowork, claude.ai — Customize → Connectors → + → Add custom connector, and paste the same URL. These clients connect from Anthropic's cloud rather than from your machine, so the server has to be reachable over the public internet; claude_desktop_config.json only configures local stdio servers, not remote URLs.

Project-scoped .mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "hgb": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "http://<server-ip>:8000/mcp"
    }
  }
}

type is required, and streamable-http is accepted as an alias for http. An entry with a url but no type is read as a stdio server and skipped with an error.

---

Docker deployment (recommended for the vServer)

Build image

docker compose build

First-time: build the database

# Copy XML to /data/hgb/ on the server, then:
docker run --rm \
  -v /data/hgb:/data \
  hgb-mcp \
  python build_db.py --xml /data/hgb_full_26_05_29_05.xml --db /data/hgb.db

Run

docker compose up -d

Update /data/hgb in docker-compose.yml to match the actual path on the vServer.

Reverse proxy (nginx)

Serving under a sub-path (https://tei.example.ch/mcp/eos/mcp) has exactly one rule: the app's --http-path and the nginx location must be the same string. The endpoint is one path answering POST, GET, and DELETE; it builds no URLs of its own, so nginx only has to forward the path unchanged.

server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    server_name tei.example.ch;

    # EOS_HTTP_PATH=/mcp/eos/mcp — same string, no trailing slash on proxy_pass.
    location /mcp/eos/mcp {
        proxy_pass         http://127.0.0.1:8000;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header   Host $host;
        proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        proxy_set_header   Connection '';
        proxy_buffering    off;
        proxy_cache        off;
        proxy_read_timeout 3600s;
        chunked_transfer_encoding on;
    }
}

Under SSE this deployment needed a sub_filter rewriting data: /messages/ in the event stream, because the handshake advertised a path outside the proxy prefix. Streamable HTTP removes that workaround entirely.

Two failure modes, both returning a bare Not Found or 405:

• A trailing slash on proxy_pass strips the location prefix, so the app sees /.
• location and --http-path disagree — every request 404s. The startup line prints the path actually served: Starting EOS MCP server on 0.0.0.0:8000/mcp/eos/mcp.

Note: the server has no authentication. By default docker-compose.yml publishes port 8000 on all interfaces; if a proxy fronts it, bind it to loopback instead:

EOS_BIND=127.0.0.1 docker compose up -d

---

Available tools

Tool	Description
corpus_stats	Document/span/person/event counts and year range
search_persons(query, limit)	FTS search for person names (FTS5 syntax)
get_document(doc_id)	Full document: text, all spans, events
get_dossier(dossier_id, limit=100)	All documents for a property, ordered by year
search_text(query, limit)	Keyword search over raw transcriptions with snippets
get_persons_in_year_range(year_from, year_to, limit)	Person mentions filtered by year
get_cooccurrences(person_name, limit)	Other persons in the same documents
list_dossiers(limit)	All properties with coordinates and year ranges

Available resources

URI	Description
hgb://stats	Corpus statistics (JSON)
hgb://dossiers	Dossier index — {total, returned, truncated, dossiers: [...]}, capped at 1000 rows and flagged when truncated
hgb://document/{doc_id}	Single document (JSON)

Query behaviour

Limits. Every limit is clamped to at most 500; a negative, zero, or non-numeric value falls back to that tool's own default. The previous min(limit, 200) guard let every negative through, and SQLite reads LIMIT -1 as unbounded.

Full-text search. search_persons and search_text pass the query to FTS5, so operators work — Hans OR Anna, Mei*, NEAR(...). An invalid FTS5 query falls back to quoted phrases and then to a literal substring search instead of raising.

Name search. SQL wildcards are escaped, so get_cooccurrences("100%") looks for a literal "100%" rather than matching every document.

Co-occurrences. get_cooccurrences caps the matching documents at COOC_DOC_CAP (400). Their ids are bound one per placeholder, so a common name matching thousands of documents would otherwise exceed SQLite's variable limit and raise too many SQL variables.

Result size. Claude.ai and Claude Desktop truncate a tool or resource result at roughly 150,000 characters. get_dossier is bounded because it carries every document's full text_raw, and get_document caps spans and events at 2000 each.

Deployment

This server runs on tei.dh.unibe.ch at https://tei.dh.unibe.ch/mcp/eos/mcp, alongside four sibling MCP servers: Königsfelden, SSRQ, HLS, HBLS.

What they share — the nginx routing, the landing pages, and the deploy sequence — lives in tei_mcp_ops. Start there for anything that spans the fleet; in particular, the app's --http-path and the nginx location have to be the same string, which is the rule a sub-path deployment turns on.

Tests

pip install pytest
pytest test_eos_mcp.py

Unit tests build their own throwaway database from db.SCHEMA_SQL and need no setup. DB and server tests skip unless pointed at them:

EOS_DB=/data/hgb.db EOS_SERVER=http://localhost:8000 pytest test_eos_mcp.py