Production-ready RAG out of the box to search and retrieve data from your own documents.
Needle mcp server lets Claude, Cursor and other MCP clients work with Needle directly. Production-ready RAG out of the box to search and retrieve data from your own documents.
MCP (Model Context Protocol) server to manage documents and perform searches using Needle through Claude's Desktop Application.
MCP (Model Context Protocol) standardizes the way LLMs connect to external data sources. You can use Needle MCP Server to easily enable semantic search tools in your AI applications, making data buried in PDFs, DOCX, XLSX, and other files instantly accessible by LLMs.
The server is distributed via npm as @smithery/cli, so most clients can run it without a manual build step. Add it to your MCP client's configuration and restart the client to pick it up — the copy-paste configs for Claude Desktop, Claude Code and Cursor are on this page.
Before the server will start you need to supply 2 environment variables: NEEDLE_API_KEY, NEEDLE_AUTH_HEADER. Keep credentials in your client's env block or a secrets manager rather than committing them.
AI-service servers chain other models into your assistant, turning a single chat into a small production pipeline. Needle sits in that group. Worth comparing against the other ai services servers in this directory before you commit to one, since several overlap in scope but differ sharply in setup cost and permissions.
{
"mcpServers": {
"needle": {
"command": "npx",
"args": [
"mcp-remote",
"https://mcp.needle.app/mcp",
"--header",
"Authorization:Bearer ${NEEDLE_API_KEY}"
],
"env": {
"NEEDLE_API_KEY": "<your-needle-api-key>"
}
}
}
}Configuration as documented by the project. Restart the client after saving.
| Variable | Description | Required |
|---|---|---|
| NEEDLE_API_KEY | Credential the server authenticates with. | Yes |
| NEEDLE_AUTH_HEADER | Configuration value read at startup. | Optional |
The simplest web tool that matters — fetch any URL and get model-ready markdown back.
Industrial-strength web extraction — render, scrape, crawl and search entire sites into clean markdown.
Puppeteer-powered browser control that drives pages from the accessibility tree instead of pixels.
Search built for AI, not humans — semantic web search that returns model-ready content, plus code context.
Answers, not links — delegate questions to Perplexity's search-grounded models and get cited responses back.
Put 6,000+ pre-built scrapers at your assistant's fingertips through one MCP endpoint.