Haypile MCP server

Haypile

Private document search, for you and your agents. One binary that watches your folders, indexes every document, and hands your agent the right passages over MCP, each with a file and page citation. Nothing ever leaves your machine.

Everyone says finding information in your files is like finding a needle in a haystack. Haypile is the haystack that finds its own needles.

brew install BenyD/tap/hay
hay add ~/Documents
claude mcp add --transport http haypile http://localhost:11500/mcp

That is the whole setup. Claude Code (or Cursor, or anything that speaks MCP) can now search everything you indexed: search_documents returns ranked passages with citations, and the agent answers from them instead of guessing.

It is a full standalone CLI too:

hay search "termination clause"
hay ask "what did the Meridian contract say about termination?"

Search understands meaning, not just words: "agreement cancellation" finds termination clauses. Exact identifiers still match exactly. Every result cites its source file and page.

Install

brew install BenyD/tap/hay

Or grab a binary from releases, or run the install script:

curl -fsSL haypile.sh | sh

On Windows, run this in PowerShell:

irm https://haypile.sh/install.ps1 | iex

One binary, around 56MB, with the embedding model inside. No Python, no Docker, no vector database, no model downloads, no network. Text documents index fully offline; scanned PDFs need a local vision model for OCR (hay llm setup).

Why

An agent can open any file you point it at. Finding the right one is the problem: grep matches words, not meaning, and a question about termination clauses does not contain the words the contract used. Reading whole documents to find one passage spends the context window the task needed. Cloud document tools fix this by uploading everything to someone else's computer, and self-hosted RAG stacks fix it with Python environments, Docker, and a vector database to babysit.

Haypile is the missing option: one binary, point it at folders, done.

• Agent-ready. MCP and REST on localhost:11500. search_documents gives Claude Code, Cursor, or your own scripts cited passages from your documents.
• Hybrid search. Semantic and keyword, merged. Paraphrases match by meaning; case numbers match exactly.
• Citations always. Every result and every answer points to the source file and page.
• Always fresh. Folders are watched. Save a file and it is searchable in seconds.
• Verifiably private. See below.

Trust commitments

These are versioned with the code and will not be quietly redrawn:

1. The open/paid boundary is declared upfront. Open forever (AGPL-3.0): indexing, search, ask, REST API, MCP, CLI, and the upcoming single-user web UI. The full single-user product, no feature hostages. Paid (later): team features such as auth, roles, audit logs, shared indexes, and a hosted version.
2. "Zero external connections" is a verifiable feature, not a claim. hay status reports outbound connections; the target is 0. No telemetry. If that ever changes it will be opt-in, documented loudly, and off by default.
3. No silent network behavior. A local-first tool must never phone home to keep working.
4. All development happens in this public repo. No private-repo surprises.

How it works

folders -> watcher -> extract (pdf/docx/pptx/md/txt/html/mbox) -> chunk -> embed
                                                            |
        you <- citations <- RRF merge <- FTS5 + vector search <- SQLite (one file)

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.