Docsift MCP server

DocSift

Convert documents once. Give agents only what they need.

<!-- Ownership marker for the official MCP Registry; it verifies this line against the README published on PyPI. Keep it. --> mcp-name: io.github.anishmoncivarghese/docsift

A 300-page PDF does not fit in a language model's context window, and pasting it in would be expensive if it did. DocSift converts documents into clean Markdown once, indexes them, and then hands back only the passages that answer a question — with page numbers and section headings, so the answer can be cited.

It runs on your machine. PDFs go through Docling, everything else through MarkItDown, both behind one interface. No cloud APIs, no accounts, no telemetry.

Where the saving comes from: retrieval, not conversion. Cleaning barely reduces tokens on PDFs, because Docling already strips headers and footers with its layout model. What changes the bill is asking a question and getting three relevant chunks back instead of a whole document.

Quickstart

Pick the engine you need — markitdown for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, HTML, CSV and EPUB; docling for PDFs (a large download: ML layout models); all for both engines plus the HTTP API and MCP server.

pip install "docsift[markitdown]" pip install "docsift[docling]" pip install "docsift[all]"

docsift convert report.pdf

That writes cleaned Markdown, token-budgeted chunks and a JSON summary to ./output/. pip install docsift on its own installs the CLI but no engine, and conversion will tell you so rather than failing obscurely.

Office means the modern formats: .docx, .xlsx, .pptx. The pre-2007 binaries — .doc, .xls, .ppt — are not supported, and DocSift refuses them by name rather than failing halfway through. Open one in PowerPoint, Keynote, LibreOffice or Google Slides and save it as .pptx first.

Use it from Claude, Codex, or another MCP client

The shortest path to the point of this tool: let an assistant search your own documents, without pasting them anywhere.

Which clients this works with

DocSift speaks MCP over stdio — the client starts it as a program on your machine. Anything that can do that is supported:

The last two are worth being clear about before you install anything. Their connector features only accept a remote MCP server at a public HTTPS URL, and DocSift has no remote transport — there is no configuration that makes a local one appear in those interfaces.

That is a deliberate position rather than an oversight. Reaching them means running DocSift on a server and uploading your documents to it, which is the opposite of the thing this tool is for. A self-hosted remote transport is a reasonable future addition; sending your files to someone else's machine is not.

1. Install it as a command, not into a project

An MCP client starts DocSift as a program, so it has to exist outside any virtualenv. Install it as a standalone tool:

uv tool install --python 3.12 "docsift[mcp,docling,markitdown]"

or with pipx:

pipx install --python python3.12 "docsift[mcp,docling,markitdown]"

DocSift needs Python 3.11 or newer. If your default is older, the version flag above is what avoids an unsatisfiable-requirements error. Expect a large download: docling brings PyTorch and layout models.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.