RIS (Rechtsinformationssystem des Bundes) is the Austrian government's official legal database: consolidated federal, state, and municipal law, case law from every Austrian court and tribunal, the authentic gazettes whose promulgated text is binding under Austrian law, the pre-parliamentary lawmaking pipeline, and ministerial decrees.

This server wraps the keyless RIS OGD REST API (v2.6, CC BY 4.0) for MCP agents, covering all 39 OGD applications and reaching back to the Reichsgesetzblatt of 1848. Every response labels the document's binding status, since only the amtssignierte gazette wording is legally binding.

Tools

Five search tools split by document class, plus a citation resolver, document retrieval, a change feed, and an offline vocabulary reference:

ris_search_legislation

Search consolidated law: BrKons (federal), LrKons (state), Gr (municipal).

• Full-text query using RIS boolean grammar: UND/ODER/NICHT or AND/OR/NOT, parentheses, quoted phrases
• title matches the title, short title, or abbreviation ("DSG", "ABGB")
• scope routes to federal law or one of the nine Bundesländer; municipality narrows a state scope to municipal law (selected norms, six Bundesländer)
• language: english serves the Erv collection of selected English translations
• in_force_as_of defaults to today. Omitting the date upstream silently searches all historical versions, so include_all_versions is the explicit opt-in and the applied date is echoed in every response
• Force-window filters (entered_force_from/to, left_force_from/to) track provisions entering or leaving force in a date range
• Section-range filtering via section_from/section_to/section_type (§, Artikel, Anlage)
• Law-level grouping via law_id (Gesetzesnummer), plus Systematik index and changed_since windows
• Output per document: section label, in-force date, ELI, parsed CELEX references, and export URLs (XML/HTML/PDF/RTF)

ris_search_case_law

Search decisions and headnotes across 17 court and tribunal applications.

• court is required and takes one application per call: vfgh, vwgh, justiz, bvwg, lvwg, dsk, upts (party-transparency senate), plus ten historical and specialized tribunals. Cross-court research fans out one call per court
• Filter by cited provision (norm, e.g. "DSG §1", "DSGVO Art32"), exact case number (case_number, Geschäftszahl), decision date range, decision kind (Erkenntnis/Beschluss/…), and full-text query
• decision_type targets headnotes (Rechtssätze), full decision texts, or both
• Court-conditional filters: issuing_body (dsk/dok/pvak/verg), court_name, legal_area, subject_area (justiz, e.g. "Datenschutzrecht"), state (lvwg/uvs), collection_number (VfSlg/VwSlg cites), party (upts), commission/senate/discrimination ground (gbk), media statute (bks)
• Output per decision: case numbers, decision date, ECLI, cited norms, keywords, the guiding principle (Leitsatz) on headnote documents, and headnote/decision URLs

ris_search_gazette

Browse the promulgation record at every level of government. For a single known gazette number, ris_lookup_citation is the direct route.

• scope: federal, one of the nine Bundesländer, district (Bezirksverwaltungsbehörden), or municipal (authentic municipal promulgations)
• Federal history is one logical series auto-routed across three era tiers: BgblAuth (2004+, authentic), BgblPdf (Staats- und Bundesgesetzblatt 1945–2003), and BgblAlt (Reichs-, Staats- und Bundesgesetzblatt 1848–1940, metadata plus ÖNB-hosted scans). Each response names the tier that served it
• One call serves one tier, so a date range crossing 2004-01-01 or 1945-01-01 is rejected with the boundary to split at rather than answered from one side of it. RIS carries no federal gazette for 1941–1944
• Filter by publication date range, gazette part (BGBl. I/II/III, or pre_1997 for the partless era), document type, issuing ministry, district authority, or municipality
• State scopes serve the authentic Landesgesetzblätter by default. series: ordinance_gazette switches to the Verordnungsblätter; state_era: legacy selects the state's earlier non-authentic series (Niederösterreich's systematic LgblNO, or the historical Lgbl elsewhere)
• Point lookup by gazette number ("BGBl. II Nr. 171/2026" or "171/2026")
• Every record carries a binding label (authentic, historical_record, or consolidated_informational) and the amtssigniert PDF URL when present. The metadata-only 1848–1940 gazettes link to their ÖNB ALEX scan

ris_search_drafts

Search federal law before it is enacted.

• stage: review_drafts covers ministerial drafts in public review (Begutachtungsentwürfe). in_review_on answers what is in review on a given date
• stage: government_bills covers bills adopted by the council of ministers (Regierungsvorlagen, 2004+), filtered by adoption date
• ministry accepts the abbreviation ("BMF") and the server expands it to RIS's exact designation
• Output includes review deadlines, council adoption dates, and the RIS web view
• materials lists the companion documents filed with the draft — Erläuterungen (the drafting reasoning the bill text omits), Textgegenüberstellung, Vorblatt/WFA, covering letter, annexes. Their filenames are opaque and per-record, so passing a materials[].url to ris_get_document is the only way to read one; format there picks the rendition, so the one URL reaches every text rendition the companion has. Where RIS files no HTML rendition — about one companion in eight, nearly all covering letters — the URL is the PDF, which is a download rather than a text rendition

ris_search_announcements

Sectoral official gazettes and executive documents: seven collections, five of them legally binding authentic publications.

• collection: social_insurance (Avsv), veterinary (Avn), court_rules (KmGer), trade_exam_rules (PruefGewO), health_structure_plans (Spg, ÖSG/RSG), ministerial_decrees (Erlässe), council_minutes (Ministerratsprotokolle)
• Collection-aware filters: issue numbers, issuers (insurance carriers, ministries), cited norm ("decrees citing the DSG"), in-force date for the consolidated collections, plan type and state for health plans, session number and legislature for council minutes
• Binding labels per collection: authentic, administrative_directive (decrees bind the administration, not citizens), or preparatory (council minutes)
• Every record carries the RIS web view — the only browsable surface for the PDF-only council minutes and for ministerial decrees

ris_lookup_citation

Resolve a citation to its canonical document.

• Parses and routes four citation kinds: norm cites ("§ 6 DSG", "Art 10 B-VG"), gazette numbers across all three federal eras plus LGBl ("BGBl. I Nr. 165/1999", "BGBl. Nr. 194/1961", "RGBl. Nr. 189/1902"), case numbers ("Ro 2026/03/0016", "2025-0.934.677", "14Os49/26a"), and collection numbers ("VfSlg 19.632/2012")
• Routes to deterministic upstream filters (section plus title, per-era number params, Geschäftszahl, Sammlungsnummer) rather than keyword search
• A state gazette number predating that Bundesland's e-Recht switch falls back to its earlier non-authentic series; a VwSlg number cited without its part letter comes back as ambiguous, naming both decisions, rather than resolved to one of them
• Returns found: false with structured guidance instead of throwing when nothing resolves
• court and state hints short-circuit ambiguous formats

ris_get_document

Read and export a single document.

• Addresses documents by document_number plus application (from any search or lookup result), or by a passed-through ris.bka.gv.at document URL (host and path allowlisted) — including a draft's companion documents from a ris_search_drafts record's materials[].url, which nothing else can reach. format selects the rendition for a companion exactly as for a main document
• format: markdown (default, boilerplate stripped), raw html, RIS xml, or urls_only
• Every response carries a binding status: authentic (with amtssigniert PDF URL), consolidated_informational, historical_record, decision, preparatory, administrative_directive, or translation
• Applications that publish only the signed PDF (district and municipal promulgations, court rules) or only scans (1848–1940 gazettes, ÖNB-hosted) return a format_unavailable notice with the usable URLs instead of failing
• Markdown over 40,000 bytes returns an outline (kind: outline) instead of truncating. Re-call with sections:[…] to pull the entries you need
• Outline entries are the document's §/Artikel/Anlage sections, or — for the court decisions, gazette bodies and announcements that carry no such headings — contiguous byte windows named Part 1 of N … Part N of N, cut at line breaks and covering the text with nothing dropped. Raw html/xml are never sliced and return whole at any size
• Returns content, not fresh metadata. The upstream API has no document-by-number search, so document numbers come from a prior search or lookup result

ris_track_changes

Exact-dated per-application change feed.

• application plus changed_from/changed_to returns every document added or changed in the window. A typical two-week federal-law window carries 1,400+ changes
• include_deleted surfaces removals, which no other RIS surface exposes
• The search tools' changed_since interval filters are the coarser alternative

Resource

All resource data is also reachable via tools — clients without resource support use ris_get_document.

Features

Built on @cyanheads/mcp-ts-core:

• Declarative tool and resource definitions — single file per primitive, framework handles registration and validation
• Unified error handling — handlers throw, framework catches, classifies, and formats
• Pluggable auth (none, jwt, oauth)
• Structured logging with optional OpenTelemetry tracing
• STDIO and Streamable HTTP transports

RIS-specific:

• All 39 OGD applications across every controller, from consolidated law and the four levels of authentic gazette to the 17 court and tribunal collections
• Strict parameter allowlist. RIS silently ignores unknown query params, so a typo returns plausible but unfiltered results; only live-confirmed spellings are sent upstream
• Normalizer for RIS's JSON-serialized-XML envelope: object-or-array coercion, in-band error detection, six per-controller metadata classes, <br/> cleanup, CELEX reference parsing, ministry-abbreviation expansion
• English tool surface over RIS's German API. Austrian legal terms (Geschäftszahl, Rechtssatz, Bundesgesetzblatt) stay as domain vocabulary and are glossed in the descriptions

Agent-friendly output:

• Error hints, zero-hit notices, format-unavailable notices, and found: false guidance each name the concrete next call: a ris_list_reference topic, the right search tool, or ris_lookup_citation
• Conditional-parameter misuse is caught locally before any upstream call: a court-specific filter with the wrong court, part outside federal scope, a collection filter on the wrong collection, bad addressing
• Zero hits return success plus a composed notice rather than an error
• Applied filters are echoed back, so the in_force_as_of default stays visible to the calling agent
• Upstream schema-validation messages pass through. RIS enumerates valid values, which lets agents self-correct

Localization

Tool and parameter descriptions are English-only today. German (de-AT) descriptions are planned, pending opt-in localization support in the framework (cyanheads/mcp-ts-core#259); the English surface stays the default and fallback.

Getting started

The one-click badges above (Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code) are the fastest path. To configure a client manually, the server runs straight from npm — no clone or build required.

Public Hosted Instance

A public instance is available at https://ris-austria.caseyjhand.com/mcp — no installation required. Point any MCP client at it via Streamable HTTP:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ris-austria-mcp-server": {
      "type": "streamable-http",
      "url": "https://ris-austria.caseyjhand.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Prerequisites

• Bun v1.3 or higher, or Node.js v24+ (needed for npx/bunx)
• No API key — the RIS OGD API is keyless

Self-hosted / local

Add the server to your MCP client configuration with Bun:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ris-austria-mcp-server": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "bunx",
      "args": ["@cyanheads/ris-austria-mcp-server@latest"]
    }
  }
}

Or with npx (no Bun required):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ris-austria-mcp-server": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@cyanheads/ris-austria-mcp-server@latest"]
    }
  }
}

Or with Docker:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ris-austria-mcp-server": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "docker",
      "args": [
        "run", "-i", "--rm",
        "-e", "MCP_TRANSPORT_TYPE=stdio",
        "ghcr.io/cyanheads/ris-austria-mcp-server:latest"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Add any configuration variables under an "env" key for bunx/npx, or as additional -e NAME=value arguments for Docker.

Install from source

For local development or to run a pinned build:

1. Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/cyanheads/ris-austria-mcp-server.git

2. Navigate into the directory:

cd ris-austria-mcp-server

3. Install dependencies and build:

bun install
bun run rebuild

4. Add to your MCP client configuration file:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ris-austria-mcp-server": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/ris-austria-mcp-server/dist/index.js"],
      "env": {
        "MCP_TRANSPORT_TYPE": "stdio",
        "MCP_LOG_LEVEL": "info"
      }
    }
  }
}

For Streamable HTTP, set the transport and start the server:

MCP_TRANSPORT_TYPE=http MCP_HTTP_PORT=3010 bun run start:http
# Server listens at http://localhost:3010/mcp

Configuration

See .env.example for the full list of optional overrides.

Running the server

Local development

• Build and run:

  sh

  Copy

  # One-time build
  bun run rebuild
  
  # Run the built server
  bun run start:stdio
  # or
  bun run start:http
  

• Run checks and tests:

  sh

  Copy

  bun run devcheck   # Lint, format, typecheck, security
  bun run test       # Vitest test suite
  bun run lint:mcp   # Validate MCP definitions against spec
  

Docker

docker build -t ris-austria-mcp-server .
docker run --rm -p 3010:3010 ris-austria-mcp-server

The Dockerfile defaults to HTTP transport, stateless session mode, and logs to /var/log/ris-austria-mcp-server. OpenTelemetry peer dependencies are installed by default; build with --build-arg OTEL_ENABLED=false to omit them.

Project structure

Development guide

See CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md for development guidelines and architectural rules. The short version:

• Handlers throw, framework catches — no try/catch in tool logic
• Use ctx.log for request-scoped logging, ctx.state for tenant-scoped storage
• Register new tools and resources via createApp() in src/index.ts
• Wrap the RIS API: validate raw → normalize to domain type → return output schema; never fabricate missing fields

License

Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE for details.

RIS OGD data is CC BY 4.0 (attribution: RIS, Bundeskanzleramt Österreich). The underlying legal texts are copyright-free official works. Only the authentic, amtssignierte gazette wording is legally binding — consolidated RIS text is informational.