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edi-mcp

edi-mcp is a Model Context Protocol server for the Environmental Data Initiative (EDI) data repository, PASTA+. EDI holds many thousands of ecological data packages from the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) network and many other projects, each described by EML metadata and published under a DOI. edi-mcp lets AI agents and coding assistants search those packages and walk the repository's scopes, identifiers and revisions, and read a package's EML metadata and data-entity descriptions, through compact, size-bounded tool results.

The server implements the MCP 2026-07-28 specification (stateless core) on the Python mcp 2.x SDK. It speaks stdio for local clients such as Claude Code and Claude Desktop, and stateless Streamable HTTP at /mcp when hosted. It is developed by idss-mesa at the University of New Mexico and released under the MIT license.

Under construction

edi-mcp is being built in seven steps, one pull request each. The discovery, package, metadata and entity tools are available now; preview, download and citation tools follow. See the Roadmap for what is planned and the Tool reference for what is available today. There is no PyPI release yet.

Install in one minute

uv tool install git+https://github.com/idss-mesa/edi-mcp
claude mcp add edi -s user -e EDI_API_KEY="$EDI_API_KEY" -- edi-mcp

Then ask your agent to call edi_ping; the reply says which backend answers your calls and whether a key is configured.

With or without an EDI API key

Since 2026-07-30 EDI's PASTA API requires an API key for every request, including reads of public data. With a key in EDI_API_KEY, edi-mcp talks to PASTA. Without one, it falls back to the anonymous DataONE replicas of EDI content, so discovery still works. A key that EDI rejects is reported as an error, never silently downgraded. See EDI API key and Backends.

Documentation

This site is an Open Knowledge Format (OKF) v0.2 knowledge bundle: every page carries YAML frontmatter with type, provenance and lifecycle fields, and the whole corpus is available to agents at llms.txt and llms-full.txt.

  • Getting started - Install edi-mcp, connect an MCP client, add your EDI API key and tune the configuration.
  • Tools - The available tools with the generated reference, package identifiers, the PASTA and DataONE backends, error codes and the roadmap.
  • MCP protocol - How edi-mcp implements the MCP 2026-07-28 stateless core and its stdio and Streamable HTTP transports.
  • Deploy - Run edi-mcp as a hosted, stateless HTTP service behind TLS, and the security model operators rely on.
  • Develop - Architecture, adding a tool, the hermetic test suite with recorded fixtures, and how to contribute.
  • About - How agents should consume this site, how to cite EDI data, licenses, and the change log.

Where to get help