Ucp-Local – Offline RAG for Claude Desktop, Cursor, and LM Studio

Ucp-Local, an open-source offline RAG server, launched as a single-binary MCP tool that indexes local files for use with Claude Desktop, Cursor, and LM Studio. The tool provides hybrid retrieval, tree-sitter code chunking, and full offline operation via Ollama, targeting privacy-sensitive workflows and air-gapped environments.

A local-first MCP server that grounds LLMs in your own files. UCP indexes folders on your machine — notes, code, conversation exports — and exposes them to any MCP-compatible client Claude Desktop, Cursor, LM Studio, and other local-agent runtimes as a single tool: search local context . Hybrid retrieval BM25 + vector , tree-sitter-aware code chunking, full citations, content-hash embedding cache. Single binary. No telemetry. No cloud. Paired with a local model in LM Studio or Ollama via ucp-local ask , the whole stack — indexing, embeddings, retrieval, and the chat model — runs fully offline. Works on a plane, in an air-gapped facility, or anywhere a cloud LLM isn't an option. Conversation memory — make every past Claude chat searchable across every future session. Air-gap RAG — local Ollama + local index, zero network traffic. Quick start — install, index, ask, in under a minute. | If you are… | UCP gives you… | |---|---| A Claude / Cursor / LM Studio power user | A searchable archive of every past AI conversation, callable from any future session as the search local context tool. | A software engineer | Code + private docs + sibling repos + past Claude chats unified under one MCP tool — surfaced inside Cursor or Claude Code alongside their native indexers. | A researcher, writer, or academic | A PDF + notes corpus you can ask grounded questions against, with line-level citations, without anything leaving the machine. | In a privacy-regulated workflow legal, medical, defense, NDA-bound IP | A single Rust binary with zero telemetry and zero cloud. Pair with LM Studio for a fully offline, end-to-end RAG stack. | A solo founder or consultant | Per-folder client isolation via folder filter — no risk of leaking client A's context into client B's session. | Full audience analysis, competitive comparison, and the two wedges UCP is explicitly built to win on: see POSITIONING.md /akshay2211/universal-context-pipeline/blob/master/POSITIONING.md . v0.1, headless. Track scope in ROADMAP.md /akshay2211/universal-context-pipeline/blob/master/ROADMAP.md . What ships: - Hybrid search: SQLite FTS5 BM25 ⨉ sqlite-vec ANN merged via reciprocal-rank fusion. - Tree-sitter chunking for Rust, Python, TypeScript/JavaScript. Heading-aware Markdown. Sentence-bounded prose fallback. - Conversation memory: ingest your Claude conversations.json export and search across past chats. - PII masking on by default — email, OpenAI sk- , AWS keys, GitHub PATs, JWT. - Content-hash embedding cache: re-indexing unchanged content makes zero Ollama calls. - Filesystem watcher: edit a file, the index updates in ~500ms. What's not in v0.1: - Desktop UI / tray deferred — was in original spec, now in ROADMAP tier 2+ . - OS hotkey injector and HTTP proxy interceptor cut from the original spec . - OpenAI / Anthropic embedding providers Ollama only for now . - Cursor and ChatGPT export formats Claude only; others later . UCP needs three things on your machine: Rust to build , Ollama to embed and optionally chat , and Poppler for robust PDF text extraction — recommended . brew install ollama poppler ollama serve & or use the menu-bar app ollama pull nomic-embed-text Optional, for ucp-local ask : ollama pull llama3.2 sudo apt install poppler-utils curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh ollama pull nomic-embed-text Optional, for ucp-local ask : ollama pull llama3.2 sudo dnf install poppler-utils curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh ollama pull nomic-embed-text choco install poppler ollama or install each manually ollama pull nomic-embed-text Rust stable, edition 2024 is needed only to build from source. If you install a pre-built UCP binary, skip the Rust install. Poppler is optional but recommended.Without it, UCP only uses the bundled pdf-extract for PDFs, which struggles with PDFs whose body fonts lack a ToUnicode CMap you'll see headings extract but body text go missing . With pdftotext from Poppler on PATH, UCP falls back to it automatically. Note on the name.The crate is published ason crates.io — the bare ucp-local ucp name was taken. The binary on your PATH is also ucp-local that's what you type on the command line , and the library is imported as use ucp local::... . cargo install ucp-local Puts the ucp-local binary on your PATH git clone <repo-url ucp-local cd ucp-local cargo build --release Binary at target/release/ucp-local cargo install --path . optional, to put ucp-local on your PATH Index one folder ucp-local index ~/Documents/notes Index multiple folders into the same store ucp-local index ~/Documents/notes ~/code/my-project ~/research Watch a folder and re-index on changes initial pass runs first ucp-local watch ~/code/my-project Clear the index — soft keeps the embedding cache so re-index is fast ucp-local clear Clear only one folder's chunks ucp-local clear ~/Documents/notes Hard reset — also wipes the embedding cache, forces re-embed on next index ucp-local clear --hard --yes Ingest a Claude conversations.json export ucp-local ingest-conversations ~/Downloads/claude-export/conversations.json Show config + index status ucp-local status Run the MCP server over stdio this is what MCP clients launch ucp-local serve Search the index from the terminal no LLM — best for debugging "did indexing actually capture this?" ucp-local search "your query here" ucp-local search "rate limiting" --folder ~/code/my-project --limit 10 Ask a question — runs search internally, then a local chat model answers with citations ucp-local ask "what does the rate limiter do when a token bucket runs out?" ucp-local ask "summarize my Q3 plan" --model qwen2.5 UCP speaks MCP over stdio, so any client that launches MCP servers can use it. Same serve command, different config file per client. Add to ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude desktop config.json on macOS %APPDATA%\Claude\claude desktop config.json on Windows : { "mcpServers": { "ucp-local": { "command": "/full/path/to/ucp-local", "args": "serve" } } } Restart Claude Desktop. The search local context tool will be available — ask something grounded in your indexed files and it'll cite them inline. Cursor reads MCP servers from ~/.cursor/mcp.json or per-project .cursor/mcp.json : { "mcpServers": { "ucp-local": { "command": "/full/path/to/ucp-local", "args": "serve" } } } Reload Cursor. The chat sidebar will surface search local context as a tool — useful for grounding the agent in repos and docs Cursor's own @codebase indexer can't reach private notes, conversation history, sibling repos . LM Studio 0.3.17+ supports MCP. Open the chat settings, find the MCP servers section, and add: { "mcpServers": { "ucp-local": { "command": "/full/path/to/ucp-local", "args": "serve" } } } Pair UCP with any local model you've downloaded in LM Studio Llama, Qwen, Mistral, etc. . Now your indexing, embeddings, retrieval, and chat model all run on the same machine — no cloud, no network — and the LLM can still call search local context to ground its answers in your files. Any client following the MCP spec Zed, Continue.dev, Goose, custom Agent SDK apps, etc. takes the same command + args shape. If your client expects a JSON-RPC stdio server, point it at ucp-local serve and you're done. ~/.config/ucp/config.toml or the platform equivalent — ucp-local status prints the resolved path . All fields optional; defaults shown: ollama host = "http://localhost:11434" embedding model = "nomic-embed-text" chunking max tokens = 512 overlap sentences = 1 By extension: md , markdown , txt , rs , py , ts , tsx , js , jsx , mjs , go , pdf . PDFs:text is extracted via pdf-extract and chunked as prose. Works well for digitally generated PDFs papers, docs, exported notes . Falls down on scanned image-only PDFs — those need OCR v0.2+ . Citation line numbers reference the extracted plaintext, not PDF page numbers; page-aware citations are on the v0.2 list. Skipped directories: .git , .idea , .vscode , target , node modules , pycache , .venv , venv , dist , build , .next , .nuxt , coverage , .pytest cache , .mypy cache . Dotfiles are skipped. | Module | Role | |---|---| ingestion | Masking + per-format chunkers prose / markdown / code via tree-sitter + dispatcher | storage | rusqlite + sqlite-vec + FTS5; hybrid search via RRF | embeddings | OllamaClient + content-hash cache via EmbeddingCache::hash | indexer | Walk + read + chunk + embed + insert; single-file and bulk-chunk paths | watcher | notify -based debounced re-index | mcp | JSON-RPC 2.0 stdio server, one tool: search local context | See CLAUDE.md /akshay2211/universal-context-pipeline/blob/master/CLAUDE.md for the developer-facing architecture summary, and Universal Context Pipeline Specification.md /akshay2211/universal-context-pipeline/blob/master/Universal%20Context%20Pipeline%20Specification.md for the original now narrower in scope design doc. cargo test full test suite cargo test --lib ingestion one module cargo run -- index <path iterate against the dev build RUST LOG=ucp local=info cargo run -- watch <path verbose Release history and notes live in CHANGELOG.md /akshay2211/universal-context-pipeline/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md . The current published version is 0.1.0 crates.io https://crates.io/crates/ucp-local . Under Apache-2.0.