MCP Server Setup

LocalLens ships as an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, letting AI agents like Claude Code and Claude Desktop search your files.

Install

pip install "locallens[mcp]"

Start

locallens serve --mcp

The server starts on port 8811 by default, using SSE transport.

Custom port

locallens serve --mcp --port 9000

Environment variables

Configure the MCP server via environment variables:

Variable	Default	Description
LOCALLENS_DATA_DIR	~/.locallens	Data directory
LOCALLENS_COLLECTION	locallens	Collection name
LOCALLENS_OLLAMA_URL	http://localhost:11434	Ollama URL
LOCALLENS_OLLAMA_MODEL	qwen2.5:3b	Ollama model
LOCALLENS_EMBEDDING_MODEL	all-MiniLM-L6-v2	Embedding model

Verify

Once running, the server prints:

LocalLens MCP server running on http://localhost:8811/sse

You can test the SSE endpoint:

curl http://localhost:8811/sse

Index first

The MCP server searches whatever is already indexed. Index your files before starting:

locallens index ~/my-project
locallens serve --mcp

Or use the locallens_index tool from within your AI client to index on demand.