MCP — ask your model

Nabu’s MCP server is read-only: a model can search, read, align, and look things up in the library, quote what it finds, and cite it, but nothing it does can change the collection. This page runs the demo, a public image (release 1.0.0) with an open slice of the library baked in. Worked research examples and wiring the server to your own full library are on the Tools page: Ask your model.

The tools

The server answers tools/list with these 14 tools, every one read-only and every payload stamped with the license class of the text it carries. Each tool’s full input schema and usage notes come back from tools/list itself.

A sample call

One tools/call against the demo image (the protocol is JSON-RPC 2.0, one object per line on stdin and stdout). The request:

{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":2,"method":"tools/call","params":{"name":"nabu_show","arguments":{"urn":"urn:nabu:sblgnt:john:1.1"}}}

The reply’s content[0].text is a JSON document. Unwrapped, it reads as follows (the provenance load record is trimmed here):

{
  "type": "passage",
  "urn": "urn:nabu:sblgnt:john:1.1",
  "language": "grc",
  "license_class": "attribution",
  "source": "sblgnt",
  "document_urn": "urn:nabu:sblgnt:john",
  "document_title": "ΚΑΤΑ ΙΩΑΝΝΗΝ",
  "text": "Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.",
  "sequence": 0,
  "revision": 1,
  "withdrawn": false,
  "provenance": [ … ]
}

Run the demo

The public image ghcr.io/arvicco/nabu-demo:1.0.0 serves the Greek New Testament, Hebrew Bible, Latin Vulgate, World English Bible, LSJ and Lewis & Short through the read-only MCP server. There is nothing to clone and no sync to run. Every source in the image and its license are listed in the license table below. The full library is a local build (Quickstart).

Docker (stdio):

docker run -i --rm ghcr.io/arvicco/nabu-demo:1.0.0

Claude Code:

claude mcp add nabu -- docker run -i --rm ghcr.io/arvicco/nabu-demo:1.0.0

Any MCP client that reads the standard mcpServers configuration (Claude Desktop’s claude_desktop_config.json, Cursor’s mcp.json, and others):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "nabu": {
      "command": "docker",
      "args": [
        "run",
        "-i",
        "--rm",
        "ghcr.io/arvicco/nabu-demo:1.0.0"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Check that it answers: pipe the protocol handshake into the image. The second line of output is the tools/list reply, naming all 14 tools:

printf '%s\n' \
  '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"initialize","params":{"protocolVersion":"2025-11-25","capabilities":{},"clientInfo":{"name":"check","version":"1"}}}' \
  '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"notifications/initialized"}' \
  '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":2,"method":"tools/list"}' \
  | docker run -i --rm ghcr.io/arvicco/nabu-demo:1.0.0

Editors, one click (both need Docker installed locally):

• Install in VS Code (or through the vscode.dev redirect)
• Add to Cursor (or through the cursor.com redirect)

Docker Desktop’s MCP Toolkit: a one-entry custom catalog (docker-mcp-catalog.yaml):

docker mcp catalog import https://arvicco.github.io/nabu/docker-mcp-catalog.yaml
# current Toolkit CLIs, which replaced `import`:
docker mcp catalog create nabu --from-legacy-catalog https://arvicco.github.io/nabu/docker-mcp-catalog.yaml

Over HTTP (streamable HTTP; PORT sets the port, default 8080):

docker run --rm -p 8080:8080 ghcr.io/arvicco/nabu-demo:1.0.0 bin/nabu mcp --http
# endpoint: POST http://localhost:8080/mcp

Hosted, one click

Both buttons deploy the same prebuilt image, release 1.0.0, as an HTTP endpoint at https://<your-service>/mcp. The demo answers comfortably within a 512 MB free instance.

• Deploy to Render. Render reads the repository’s render.yaml, a Blueprint that names the prebuilt image by its release tag, then pulls that image and starts it in HTTP mode. It does not compile anything from the repository. Render’s free instances sleep after about fifteen minutes idle, and the first request after that waits roughly a minute while the instance wakes.
• Deploy to Koyeb. Koyeb pulls the same tagged image directly. Its free instance scales to zero when idle, so the first request after a quiet spell pays a cold start of several seconds.

Access control over HTTP. Local stdio is the default: the client starts the container itself and talks to it over a pipe, so nothing listens on the network. HTTP mode is different. The server has no authentication and no TLS of its own, and inside the image it binds every interface, so anyone who can reach /mcp can call every tool. The tools are read-only and the demo data is openly licensed, but a hosted endpoint you don’t mean to be public needs its own access control in front of it (a reverse proxy that authenticates, a private network, or your platform’s access rules), with TLS terminated there. Browser requests from origins other than loopback are refused unless listed in NABU_MCP_ALLOWED_ORIGINS.

What the demo carries

The demo is built only from sources whose license class is open or attribution, and the build refuses anything else. The demo set is the texts and dictionaries in the image; the instruments are the registries and gazetteers the tools read. The image’s /demo/demo-census.json lists the same sources with their document and passage counts.