better-qdrant-mcp 0.3.0

A Python MCP server for Qdrant memory storage and semantic search, compatible with Cursor-like MCP clients.

better-qdrant-mcp

An MCP server implemented with fastmcp, OpenAI embeddings, and qdrant-client, providing long-term memory and semantic search on top of Qdrant.

User Guide

Features

• MCP server built with fastmcp
• Hybrid search in Qdrant (dense OpenAI embeddings + sparse BM25)
• Chinese support via jieba
• Three tools aligned with the Node.js version:
  • memory-store
  • memory-search
  • memory-debug
• Multiple transports: stdio, SSE, streamable HTTP

Requirements

• Python 3.12+
• Qdrant reachable via HTTP

Quick Start (published package)

The project is published as the better-qdrant-mcp package, so you can run it directly with uvx without cloning this repo.

1. Environment variables (required for all transports)

Minimal env for typical use:

• QDRANT_URL – defaults to http://localhost:6333
• QDRANT_API_KEY – optional
• COLLECTION_NAME – optional default collection
• OPENAI_API_KEY (or OPENAPI_API_KEY) – required
• OPENAI_BASE_URL – optional
• OPENAI_EMBEDDING_MODEL – defaults to text-embedding-3-small

Advanced / transport-related env:

• MCP_TRANSPORT – stdio | sse | streamable-http (default: stdio)
• MCP_HOST – host for HTTP-based transports (default: 0.0.0.0)
• MCP_PORT – port for HTTP-based transports (default: 8000)
• MCP_PATH – path for HTTP transports (default: /mcp)

2. Available MCP tools

Once the server is running, the MCP client will see three tools:

• memory-store(information, metadata?: dict, collection_name?: str) -> str
• memory-search(query, limit?: int=5, collection_name?: str) -> str
• memory-debug(collection_name?: str) -> str

memory-search uses hybrid search in Qdrant (dense + sparse). If the collection is configured with named vectors dense and sparse, queries are ranked by fusing dense OpenAI embeddings and sparse BM25 scores; otherwise it falls back to dense-only search.

3. Start the server

You can either specify the transport via CLI flags (recommended for quick start) or via env (MCP_TRANSPORT).

Standard IO (stdio) – default

uvx better-qdrant-mcp

In this mode, you configure your MCP client to use stdio transport and just invoke the binary; no HTTP URL is needed.

Server-Sent Events (SSE)

# Default host 0.0.0.0 and port 8000
uvx better-qdrant-mcp --transport sse

# Custom host and port
uvx better-qdrant-mcp --transport sse --host 0.0.0.0 --port 3000

Connection details for MCP clients:

• Transport: sse
• URL: http://<host>:<port>/sse (for example: http://localhost:8000/sse)

Streamable HTTP (recommended for web applications)

# Default host 0.0.0.0, port 8000 and path /mcp
uvx better-qdrant-mcp --transport streamable-http

# Custom host, port, and path
uvx better-qdrant-mcp --transport streamable-http --host 0.0.0.0 --port 3000 --path /api/mcp

Connection details for MCP clients:

• Transport: streamable-http
• URL: http://<host>:<port><path> (for example: http://localhost:8000/mcp)

Development Guide

Local installation (for development)

If you want to work on this repo locally instead of using the published package:

# using uv (recommended)
uv sync

# or with pip (editable install)
pip install -e .

Local build

For local development, you can use the provided Makefile:

make build

This command will first clean the dist directory and then run uv build to produce fresh artifacts.

Docker Deployment

Docker Compose provides Qdrant + this MCP server as a single service. Transport (stdio, sse, streamable-http) is selected via MCP_TRANSPORT.

The Docker image is built and published automatically to GitHub Container Registry as:

• ghcr.io/jtsang4/better-qdrant-mcp:latest
• Additional tags for branches, tags, and commit SHAs

The provided docker-compose.yml uses this published image directly, so you do not need to build the image locally.

# Start Qdrant + MCP using the published image
docker compose up -d

# Pull the latest published image and restart services
docker compose pull mcp && docker compose up -d

# Stop services
docker compose down

License

MIT