WSO2 Docs MCP Server

"This is an unofficial community project. Not affiliated with or endorsed by WSO2."

A production-ready Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that provides AI assistants (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code) with semantic search over WSO2 documentation via Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).

Under the hood, it uses a blazing-fast dual-ingestion engine:

• GitHub Native: Fetches raw Markdown directly from WSO2's public GitHub repositories via the Git Trees API (avoids web-scraping noise and rate limits)
• Web Crawl Fallback: For products without dedicated GitHub docs repos (like the WSO2 Library)

Architecture

Documentation Sources

Prerequisites

• Node.js ≥ 20
• Docker (for pgvector)
• Embeddings - no API key required by default:
  • Ollama (recommended) - runs locally, model auto-downloaded on first run
  • If Ollama is not running, the server automatically falls back to HuggingFace ONNX (in-process, also downloads automatically)
  • Cloud providers are also supported: OpenAI, Google Gemini, Voyage AI

Quick Start

Choose the setup path that fits your use case:

• Install from npm - simplest, no cloning required
• Clone and build - for development or contributions

Install from npm

Install the package globally to get the wso2-docs-mcp-server, wso2-docs-crawl, and wso2-docs-migrate commands available system-wide:

npm install -g wso2-docs-mcp-server

Prefer no global install? You can use npx wso2-docs-mcp-server, npx wso2-docs-crawl, and npx wso2-docs-migrate in every step below - just replace the bare command with its npx equivalent.

1. Start pgvector

Download the docker-compose.yml and start the database:

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/iamvirul/wso2-docs-mcp-server/main/docker-compose.yml
docker compose up -d

2. Start Ollama (optional but recommended)

Install Ollama and pull the default embedding model:

ollama pull nomic-embed-text
ollama serve

No Ollama? Skip this step. The server automatically falls back to HuggingFace ONNX - model downloads on first use with no extra setup.

3. Run database migration

DATABASE_URL="postgresql://wso2mcp:wso2mcp@localhost:5432/wso2docs" \
  wso2-docs-migrate

Run migration again whenever you change EMBEDDING_DIMENSIONS (i.e. switch embedding provider). The script detects and handles dimension changes automatically.

4. Index WSO2 documentation

# Index all products (first run downloads the embedding model automatically)
DATABASE_URL="postgresql://wso2mcp:wso2mcp@localhost:5432/wso2docs" \
  wso2-docs-crawl

# Index a single product (faster, great for testing)
DATABASE_URL="postgresql://wso2mcp:wso2mcp@localhost:5432/wso2docs" \
  wso2-docs-crawl --product ballerina --limit 20

# Force re-index even unchanged pages
DATABASE_URL="postgresql://wso2mcp:wso2mcp@localhost:5432/wso2docs" \
  wso2-docs-crawl --force

Available product IDs: apim, mi, bi, choreo, is, ballerina, library

5. Configure your AI client

The MCP server is launched on demand by your AI client - no background process needed.

Claude Desktop - edit ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "wso2-docs": {
      "command": "wso2-docs-mcp-server",
      "env": {
        "DATABASE_URL": "postgresql://wso2mcp:wso2mcp@localhost:5432/wso2docs",
        "EMBEDDING_PROVIDER": "ollama"
      }
    }
  }
}

Claude Code - run once in your terminal:

claude mcp add wso2-docs \
  --transport stdio \
  -e DATABASE_URL="postgresql://wso2mcp:wso2mcp@localhost:5432/wso2docs" \
  -e EMBEDDING_PROVIDER="ollama" \
  -- wso2-docs-mcp-server

# Verify
claude mcp list

Cursor - create .cursor/mcp.json in your project root:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "wso2-docs": {
      "command": "wso2-docs-mcp-server",
      "env": {
        "DATABASE_URL": "postgresql://wso2mcp:wso2mcp@localhost:5432/wso2docs",
        "EMBEDDING_PROVIDER": "ollama"
      }
    }
  }
}

VS Code - create .vscode/mcp.json:

{
  "servers": {
    "wso2-docs": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "wso2-docs-mcp-server",
      "env": {
        "DATABASE_URL": "postgresql://wso2mcp:wso2mcp@localhost:5432/wso2docs",
        "EMBEDDING_PROVIDER": "ollama"
      }
    }
  }
}

Using npx instead of global install? Replace "command": "wso2-docs-mcp-server" with "command": "npx" and add "args": ["-y", "wso2-docs-mcp-server"].

Cloud embedding provider? Add the key to env, e.g. "EMBEDDING_PROVIDER": "openai", "OPENAI_API_KEY": "sk-...".

Clone and build

1. Clone and install

git clone https://github.com/iamvirul/wso2-docs-mcp-server.git
cd wso2-docs-mcp-server
npm install

2. Start Ollama (optional but recommended)

Install Ollama and start it:

ollama serve

No Ollama? Skip this step. The server detects Ollama is not running and automatically falls back to HuggingFace ONNX inference - the model downloads on first use with no extra setup.

3. Configure environment

cp .env.example .env
# Defaults work out of the box with Ollama.
# Only edit if using a cloud provider (OpenAI / Gemini / Voyage).

4. Start pgvector

docker compose up -d
# pgAdmin available at http://localhost:5050 (admin@wso2mcp.local / admin)

5. Run database migration

npm run db:migrate

Note: Run migration again whenever you change EMBEDDING_DIMENSIONS (i.e. switch embedding provider). The script detects and handles dimension changes automatically.

6. Index documentation

# Index all products
# On first run the embedding model is downloaded automatically (Ollama or HuggingFace)
npm run crawl

# Index a single product (faster, great for testing)
npm run crawl -- --product ballerina --limit 20

# Force re-index even unchanged pages
npm run crawl -- --force

7. Build and start the MCP server

npm run build
npm start

For development (no build step):

npm run dev

8. Configure your AI client

Replace /ABSOLUTE/PATH/TO/wso2-docs-mcp-server with your actual clone path.

Claude Desktop - edit ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "wso2-docs": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/ABSOLUTE/PATH/TO/wso2-docs-mcp-server/dist/src/index.js"],
      "env": {
        "DATABASE_URL": "postgresql://wso2mcp:wso2mcp@localhost:5432/wso2docs",
        "EMBEDDING_PROVIDER": "ollama"
      }
    }
  }
}

Claude Code:

claude mcp add wso2-docs \
  --transport stdio \
  -e DATABASE_URL="postgresql://wso2mcp:wso2mcp@localhost:5432/wso2docs" \
  -e EMBEDDING_PROVIDER="ollama" \
  -- node "/ABSOLUTE/PATH/TO/wso2-docs-mcp-server/dist/src/index.js"

# Verify
claude mcp list

See config-examples/claude_code.sh for a convenience script.

Cursor - create .cursor/mcp.json - see config-examples/cursor_mcp.json.

VS Code - create .vscode/mcp.json - see config-examples/vscode_mcp.json.

MCP Tools

Example response

[
  {
    "title": "Deploying WSO2 API Manager",
    "snippet": "WSO2 API Manager can be deployed in various topologies…",
    "source_url": "https://apim.docs.wso2.com/en/latest/install-and-setup/...",
    "product": "apim",
    "section": "Deployment Patterns",
    "score": 0.8712
  }
]

Local Embeddings

The default EMBEDDING_PROVIDER=ollama runs entirely on your machine with no API key. The startup sequence is:

Is Ollama running?
├── Yes → Is model present?
│         ├── Yes → Ready (instant)
│         └── No  → Pull via Ollama (streamed, runs once)
└── No  → Download ONNX model from HuggingFace Hub (~250 MB, cached after first run)
           and run inference in-process via @huggingface/transformers

Both paths use nomic-embed-text / Xenova/nomic-embed-text-v1 by default and produce identical 768-dim vectors, so you can switch between them without re-indexing.

Hardware acceleration (HuggingFace ONNX fallback)

When Ollama is not available, the server auto-detects the best compute backend: