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MCP Server — Quickstart

The flexible-graphrag-mcp package is a standalone MCP server that connects Claude Desktop, Cursor, and other MCP clients to the Flexible GraphRAG backend.

Step 1 — Install the MCP server

# uvx downloads and runs automatically — nothing to pre-install
uvx flexible-graphrag-mcp

pipx install flexible-graphrag-mcp

pip install flexible-graphrag-mcp
# or
uv pip install flexible-graphrag-mcp

Step 2 — Start the backend

The backend must be running before MCP clients can connect.

uv venv venv-3.13 --python 3.13
venv-3.13\Scripts\Activate   # Windows
source venv-3.13/bin/activate  # Linux/macOS
uv pip install flexible-graphrag
flexible-graphrag

Backend runs at http://localhost:8000.

Step 3 — Connect Claude Desktop

Add to claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "flexible-graphrag": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["flexible-graphrag-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "FLEXIBLE_GRAPHRAG_API_BASE": "http://localhost:8000"
      }
    }
  }
}

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "flexible-graphrag": {
      "command": "flexible-graphrag-mcp",
      "env": {
        "FLEXIBLE_GRAPHRAG_API_BASE": "http://localhost:8000"
      }
    }
  }
}

Config file locations:

  • Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json
  • macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

Restart Claude Desktop after saving the config.

Permission filtering

By default the backend leaves out documents from sources that need a sign-in (Alfresco, Nuxeo, CMIS, and any of SharePoint, OneDrive, Box, Drive, GCS, Azure Blob, S3 whose sign-in is set up) when a question brings no sign-in. For unfiltered MCP answers, set the same random value as TRUSTED_CLIENT_KEY in the backend .env and FLEXIBLE_GRAPHRAG_TRUSTED_KEY in the env block above. To filter per user, pass source_auth (from sign_in), or set MCP_BROWSER_SIGN_IN=true for browser sign-in tools. See Permission Filtering — Three Levels.

Client Support

Client Transport Notes
Claude Desktop stdio Add to claude_desktop_config.json
Cursor stdio Add to MCP settings
MCP Inspector HTTP (Streamable) See Developer MCP Setup
Any MCP client stdio or HTTP Standard MCP protocol

See MCP Tools for the full list of available tools.