Silica Core MCP server

Lightweight, local evidence retrieval tools for code and research

Silica locates the source, symbol, page, or passage you and your agents need. Maximum signal, minimum machinery.

<!-- The MCP registry proves ownership of the PyPI package by finding this string in the description PyPI renders, which is this file. --> <!-- mcp-name: io.github.kiycoh/silica-core -->

Silica indexes the markdown, code, PDFs and office files under one root and serves them to Claude Code, Cursor, Hermes, Codex, OpenCode and every other popular harness, as MCP tools or as shell commands that print the same JSON. A hit is a path, a section, a line, a window of text and the numbers to judge it by. The harness owns the loop.

Three commands, then a question asked the way you would ask any other. The harness calls silica_search, and the answer carries the file, the page and the line it came from.

Install

uv tool install 'silica-core[mcp]'         # BM25 over documents and their sections (faster, lighter)
uv tool install 'silica-core[mcp,dense]'   # in addition the dense leg: numpy, a static model (still fast, more precise)

The second line adds the dense leg: numpy and a static model2vec model, no torch and no GPU. It stays inert until the model is named and the sections are embedded — the last stanza of the Quickstart. Take it when the questions are paraphrases that share no words with the text; an exact term or an identifier is answered by the lexical leg either way, and only that leg reports terms_absent.

pipx works the same. The package is silica-core, the command is silica, the tools are silica_*.

Quickstart

In any folder of markdown, code, PDFs or office files:

silica init                               # adopt the folder: ignore file, vault.yaml, first index; the MCP server serves adopted folders only
silica search "leveled compaction" -k 5  # the best located passages
silica setup claude                      # register the MCP server, write the guidance block into ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md

# optional, with the [dense] extra: the dense leg, a static model, nothing leaves the machine
export SILICA_EMBEDDING_MODEL=model2vec/minishlab/potion-retrieval-32M
silica index --embed

Nine arXiv papers, indexed in 2.1 s. The hit names the file, the page and the passage; the page beside it is the check.

Tools

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.