PDF MCP
PDF MCP is an MCP server that adds search and knowledge tools to AI assistants such as Claude Desktop, Claude Code and Cursor. Agentic RAG over one PDF or a whole folder: hybrid search, selective page reads, tables, OCR. It has 147 GitHub stars, is released under the MIT license and runs locally with uvx pdf-mcp.
- AI & search
- MIT
- Actively maintained
Install PDF MCP
Generated from the server's MCP registry entry. Replace your-value with your own values.
Claude Desktop
{
"mcpServers": {
"pdf-mcp": {
"command": "uvx",
"args": [
"pdf-mcp"
],
"env": {
"PDF_MCP_CACHE_DIR": "your-value",
"PDF_MCP_CACHE_TTL": "your-value"
}
}
}
}Settings > Developer > Edit Config. macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/, Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\. Restart Claude Desktop afterwards.
Claude Code
claude mcp add --env PDF_MCP_CACHE_DIR=your-value --env PDF_MCP_CACHE_TTL=your-value --transport stdio pdf-mcp -- uvx pdf-mcpCursor
{
"mcpServers": {
"pdf-mcp": {
"type": "stdio",
"command": "uvx",
"args": [
"pdf-mcp"
],
"env": {
"PDF_MCP_CACHE_DIR": "your-value",
"PDF_MCP_CACHE_TTL": "your-value"
}
}
}
}Project file; use ~/.cursor/mcp.json to enable it in every project.
VS Code
{
"servers": {
"pdf-mcp": {
"type": "stdio",
"command": "uvx",
"args": [
"pdf-mcp"
],
"env": {
"PDF_MCP_CACHE_DIR": "your-value",
"PDF_MCP_CACHE_TTL": "your-value"
}
}
}
}Config formats checked against the official docs on Oct 7, 2026: modelcontextprotocol.io (opens in a new tab), code.claude.com (opens in a new tab), cursor.com (opens in a new tab), code.visualstudio.com (opens in a new tab).
Environment variables
Variables the server reads at startup.
| Name | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|
PDF_MCP_CACHE_DIR | No | Directory for storing PDF cache (default: ~/.cache/pdf-mcp) |
PDF_MCP_CACHE_TTL | No | Cache time-to-live in hours (default: 24) |
Tools (13)
Parsed from the Tools section of the README; check the repository for the current list.
pdf_infoPage count, metadata, TOC summary, scanned-page detection. Call first.
pdf_searchHybrid search (keyword + semantic), page or section granularity, paragraph or context-window excerpts with source…
pdf_read_pagesRead specific pages or ranges, with OCR on demand, tables, and embedded images
pdf_read_allRead a whole document in one call, byte-capped
pdf_get_tocFull table of contents for documents with many bookmarks
pdf_render_pagesRender pages as PNG for vision models: diagrams, handwriting, scans
pdf_extract_chartChart data as exact (x, y) tables, read from plot geometry
pdf_corpus_warmWarm a folder of PDFs into the cache within a time budget
pdf_corpus_overviewPer-document triage cards for a folder
pdf_corpus_searchSearch across a folder, with document and page provenance; excerptstyle="auto" picks the excerpt unit per query
pdf_cache_statsPer-document cache breakdown and total size
pdf_cache_clearClear expired or all cache entries
server_infoWhich optional features and config are active
About PDF MCP
Agentic RAG over your PDFs, one file or a whole folder, as a single MCP tool. The agent decides when to search; pdf-mcp does the retrieval and hands back excerpts. It is an MCP server that lets Claude Code and other AI agents search one PDF or a whole folder by meaning or keyword, read only the pages that matter, and cleanly pull out tables, images, and scanned text, even from multi-column and Japanese layouts, with optional CUDA acceleration for warming large corpora.
- ai
- claude
- document-processing
- llm
- mcp
- python
- codex-cli
- opencode
- mcp-server
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What is PDF MCP?
PDF MCP is an MCP server that adds search and knowledge tools to AI assistants such as Claude Desktop, Claude Code and Cursor. Agentic RAG over one PDF or a whole folder: hybrid search, selective page reads, tables, OCR. It has 147 GitHub stars, is released under the MIT license and runs locally with uvx pdf-mcp. The source code is at github.com/jztan/pdf-mcp.
How do I install the PDF MCP MCP server?
Add the command uvx pdf-mcp to your MCP client: put it in claude_desktop_config.json for Claude Desktop, run claude mcp add for Claude Code, or add it to .cursor/mcp.json (Cursor) or .vscode/mcp.json (VS Code). The snippets on this page are ready to paste.
Is PDF MCP free?
The server is open source under the MIT license, so running it is free. It does not declare any required API key.
Is PDF MCP actively maintained?
The most recent commit was on Oct 4, 2026. The latest release is v3.5.0, published Oct 3, 2026. appsgit only lists MCP servers with a commit in the last six months and re-checks every server daily.