About ContextPull
ContextPull turns a document folder into an index and sections that an LLM agent can retrieve on demand, for workflows that control what enters context. It works offline with a single SQLite file and provides an MCP server plus readers in several languages.
Key features
- 01Split documents into sections with stable identifiers
- 02Keep a table of contents in model context
- 03Search, read, grep, and inspect neighboring sections on demand
- 04Use one SQLite file and work offline
- 05Provide Python, TypeScript, and Go implementations
Use cases
- 01Find exact document sections for a question
- 02Inspect matches and adjacent clauses
- 03Have an agent cite source locations in answers
- 04Serve document queries through a shared read-only endpoint
MCP support
The MCP server places the index in its instructions and exposes five on-demand operation tools to MCP clients. It supports STDIO and streamable HTTP; TypeScript and Go implementations also return the same results over MCP.
Configuration
Local server config is the same for every client. Copy it into your client’s MCP config file.
Tools
Local servers expose tools only once running on your machine, and the maintainer has not provided a tool list.
Details
From the project READMEContextPull
Website: https://mi2arun.github.io/contextpull/ · demo · docs · MCP Registry io.github.mi2arun/contextpull
Pull, don't push. ContextPull turns a folder of documents into something an LLM agent can pull from the way Claude Code pulls from a codebase: a small index that is always in context, and five tools that return exact sections on demand. The model never receives content it did not ask for.
Zero runtime dependencies. One SQLite file. Works offline.
ContextPull ships with a companion, ragbisect (formerly stagewise): a neutral benchmark harness that builds an eval set from your corpus and scores ContextPull next to bm25, dense and hybrid pipelines. Two names, one project, kept apart so the measurement stays independent of the thing it measures.
Status
M1 to M3 are built: store, ingest, the five operations, CLI, conformance suite, MCP server, Claude Code integration, LLM summaries, protocol client examples, ragbisect adapters, and a TypeScript reader and server. See the roadmap.
Measured
uv documentation, 603 sections, 221 self-generated questions, recall@5, from docs/testing.md:
| config | recall@5 | ms/q | model tokens/q |
|---|---|---|---|
| hybrid push (dense + bm25) | 0.964 | 69 | 0 |
| bm25 push | 0.923 | 5 | 0 |
| pull, Claude Code (10-question sample) | 1.000 | 26,565 | 86,656 |
| pull, gpt-5.4-mini with reasoning off | 0.615 | 16,023 | 10,891 |
A strong agent reads the right section every time; a small no-reasoning model reads the right section when it reads (NDCG 0.96 given a hit) but misses the gold section on 38% of questions. Push retrieval is nearly free per query; pull costs tens of thousands of tokens. Both facts are in the table on purpose. The model's own searches surfaced the gold section on 88% of a sample, so most of the gap is snippets being answered from rather than read; a stricter prompt did not change that. An earlier version of this table showed 0.045 for the small model; that number came from a threading bug in the benchmark adapter and is retracted in docs/testing.md.
Try it
Fastest: ./scripts/demo.sh ingests the bundled fixture corpus and walks through index, search, read and grep, then prints the exact claude mcp add line. ./scripts/demo.sh ./your-docs does the same on your own folder.
uv tool install contextpull # or: pip install contextpull (PyPI: contextpull 0.2.0)
contextpull ingest ./docs # writes .contextpull/store.sqlite
contextpull index # the always-in-context table of contents
contextpull search "refund window" --in policy-2025.md
contextpull read policy-2025.md#3 --context 1
contextpull grep TX-4419
contextpull neighbours specs.md#1
contextpull export-chunks > chunks.jsonl # ragbisect-compatible sections
In Claude Code
claude mcp add contextpull -- uvx --from "contextpull[mcp]" contextpull serve ./docs
The server ingests ./docs into ./docs/.contextpull/store.sqlite, puts the index into its instructions so it is always in context, and exposes the five tools. Ask a question; the trace shows search, then read, then an answer with [path.md#3] citations. contextpull claude-md prints a CLAUDE.md snippet if you want to tell the model about it explicitly. Add --summarizer openai:gpt-5.4-mini for model-written one-line summaries in the index (cached by document hash).
Any other MCP host works the same way; see examples/clients/ for TypeScript, Go and Java protocol clients and examples/direct_api_loop.py for using the tools straight from a model API with no server.
More
uv sync --extra pdf # PDFs: headings inferred from font size
uv run contextpull ingest ./docs --embed-model openai:text-embedding-3-small # enables: search --mode hybrid
uv run contextpull serve ./docs --transport http --port 8765 # streamable HTTP at /mcp for a shared read-only server
As a library
Embedding it in your own product, with access control and air-gap notes: docs/embedding.md and examples/embed_with_acl.py.
from contextpull import Store, Ops
with Store.open(".contextpull/store.sqlite") as store:
ops = Ops(store)
print(ops.index())
hits = ops.search("refund window", in_=["policy-2024.md", "policy-2025.md"]).hits
for h in hits:
print(h.id, h.heading_path, h.snippet)
section = ops.read(hits[0].id).section
Tool definitions for any model API are in contextpull.tools.TOOLS (Anthropic shape) and openai_tools(); tools.json at the repo root is the same thing for other languages.
How it works
- Ingest parses Markdown, text, docx, xlsx, pptx and (with the
pdfextra) PDF into headings, paragraphs, tables and code, and cuts heading-aware sections with stable ids likepolicy-2025.md#3. Tables and code are never split mid-block; long tables are split by rows and every part carries the header. Unchanged files are skipped on re-ingest. - Store is one SQLite file with an FTS5 index whose tokenizer keeps identifiers whole (
--no-cache,UV_CACHE_DIR,TX-4419,3.12). - Index is a token-budgeted table of contents, one line per document, delivered into the model's context. It goes hierarchical when a corpus is too large for the budget.
- Tools:
index,search(ids and snippets, never bodies),read(verbatim),grep(exact matches),neighbours(the header row, the next clause).
Node
sdk/typescript/ is a store-native reader and MCP server in TypeScript over better-sqlite3: open the same store file, no Python at query time. Published to npm as contextpull.
npx contextpull serve /path/store.sqlite # npm: contextpull 0.1.0
claude mcp add contextpull -- npx -y contextpull serve /path/store.sqlite
It passes the same conformance suite as the Python reference and returns identical results over MCP. Ingest stays in Python (npx contextpull ingest delegates to uvx contextpull ingest).
Go
sdk/go/ is a store-native reader and a single static binary server, pure Go, no cgo: the shape for a shared read-only deployment.
cd sdk/go && go build -o contextpull-server ./cmd/contextpull-server
./contextpull-server serve /data/store.sqlite --http 0.0.0.0:8765 # or without --http for stdio
Same conformance suite, identical results to Python over MCP.
Other languages
The store file is the contract. docs/store-format.md says what a reader must do; conformance/ holds a fixture corpus, its store and expected results. An SDK in any language is done when check passes. See the SDK plan.
Docs
Start at docs/README.md: architecture, design, system design, tool reference, evaluation, roadmap, decision records.
Measured with ragbisect, which lives next door.
Comments
New to MCP?
From what the protocol is to installing your first server, these answers cover most first questions.
An open protocol that defines how AI applications connect to external tools and data in a uniform way. Clients talk to the model; MCP servers provide tools, resources and prompt templates. They exchange standard messages, so one server can be reused by many clients.