The markitdown-mcp package provides a lightweight STDIO and SSE MCP server for calling MarkItDown.

It exposes one tool: convert_to_markdown(uri), where uri can be any http:, https:, file:, or data: URI.

To install the package, use pip:

pip install markitdown-mcp

To run the MCP server, ussing STDIO (default) use the following command:

markitdown-mcp

To run the MCP server, using SSE use the following command:

markitdown-mcp --sse --host 127.0.0.1 --port 3001

To run markitdown-mcp in Docker, build the Docker image using the provided Dockerfile:

docker build -t markitdown-mcp:latest .

And run it using:

docker run -it --rm markitdown-mcp:latest

This will be sufficient for remote URIs. To access local files, you need to mount the local directory into the container. For example, if you want to access files in /home/user/data, you can run:

docker run -it --rm -v /home/user/data:/workdir markitdown-mcp:latest

Once mounted, all files under data will be accessible under /workdir in the container. For example, if you have a file example.txt in /home/user/data, it will be accessible in the container at /workdir/example.txt.

It is recommended to use the Docker image when running the MCP server for Claude Desktop.

Follow these instrutions to access Claude's claude_desktop_config.json file.

Edit it to include the following JSON entry:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "markitdown": {
      "command": "docker",
      "args": [
        "run",
        "--rm",
        "-i",
        "markitdown-mcp:latest"
      ]
    }
  }
}

If you want to mount a directory, adjust it accordingly:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "markitdown": {
      "command": "docker",
      "args": [
	"run",
	"--rm",
	"-i",
	"-v",
	"/home/user/data:/workdir",
	"markitdown-mcp:latest"
      ]
    }
  }
}

To debug the MCP server you can use the mcpinspector tool.

npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector

You can then connect to the insepctor through the specified host and port (e.g., http://localhost:5173/).

If using STDIO:

• select STDIO as the transport type,
• input markitdown-mcp as the command, and
• click Connect

If using SSE:

• select SSE as the transport type,
• input http://127.0.0.1:3001/sse as the URL, and
• click Connect

Finally:

• click the Tools tab,
• click List Tools,
• click convert_to_markdown, and
• run the tool on any valid URI.

The server does not support authentication, and runs with the privileges if the user running it. For this reason, when running in SSE mode, it is recommended to run the server bound to localhost (default).

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