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Quickstart with Claude Desktop

Wire legal-text-mcp-de into Claude Desktop as a custom MCP server.

Prerequisites

  • Claude Desktop installed.
  • uv available on PATH (installation).

Configuration

Edit Claude Desktop's MCP servers configuration (Settings → Developer → Edit Config) and add:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "legal-text-mcp-de": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["legal-text-mcp-de"],
      "env": {
        "DATASET_PATH": "/path/to/legal-text-package",
        "STRICT_STARTUP": "true"
      }
    }
  }
}

Replace the DATASET_PATH with your generated package directory, or omit the env block to use the bundled fixture corpus for quick exploration.

Fixture corpus

Omit the env block entirely to use the bundled fixture corpus. This starts the server against ~10 German federal laws and is useful for trying out the tools before you have a full generated corpus.

Restart Claude Desktop. The nine tools appear in the tool list.

Verification

In a new Claude conversation:

List the available German law codes.

Claude should invoke list_laws and return a list including abbreviations like BGB, StGB, DSGVO.

Configuration file location

Platform Path
macOS ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
Windows %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json