Model Context Protocol

Three tools, two ways to connect

Two ways to connect. Over HTTP you need nothing but a URL and a key — no file, no Python, no install. The stdio server remains for clients that want to run it locally.

Remote — one command

The instance speaks MCP over HTTP directly. Point a client at it:

claude mcp add --transport http oort \
  https://oort.is-a-good.dev/v1/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY"

That is the whole setup. The same API key works here, over curl, and in the playground — one credential, one rate limit, one audit trail.

Local — stdio

If you would rather run it yourself, the stdio server is one file that imports nothing outside the standard library — it runs under whatever python3 is on your PATH.

curl -o ~/oort_mcp.py https://oort.is-a-good.dev/assets/oort_mcp.py

Then point your client at that file — the stdio tab above generates the command.

API key (stays in this page)

Tools

Tool	Arguments	Returns
`oort_search`	`query`, `max_results`, `max_tokens`, `depth`, `include_domains`, `exclude_domains`, `freshness_days`	Ranked passages with offsets and headings
`oort_extract`	`urls`, `max_tokens`, `extract_fields`, `screenshot`	Clean markdown per URL, plus structured fields
`oort_map`	`url`, `limit`, `search`, `include_subdomains`	Site URLs, from sitemap or the local index

Environment

Variable	Default	Notes
`OORT_MCP_BASE_URL`	`http://127.0.0.1:8080`	Must be http or https; anything else is refused at import
`OORT_MCP_API_KEY`	—	Required. Keep it in your client config, not in the file
`OORT_MCP_TIMEOUT_S`	`60`	Browser rendering and PDFs are legitimately slow

Design notes

Failures are results

A tool that cannot reach the API returns isError with the reason, not a protocol error — so the model can read what went wrong and adapt instead of stalling.

Scheme is validated

urlopen honours file://. The base URL is checked at import, because a config typo should not become a local file read.

Untrusted content stays fenced

Passages reach the model inside the same delimiters the API returns. The MCP layer does not unwrap them.

No SDK

JSON-RPC over stdio is about 80 lines. Vendoring an SDK to save them would add a dependency that outlives its usefulness.

Verify the connection with claude mcp list — Oort should report three tools. If it reports none, check that OORT_MCP_API_KEY is exported in the shell that launched your client.