olostep

Olostep MCP Server provides a bridge to Olostep's scraping, extraction, and search capabilities via the MCP (Model Context Protocol) interface. Once running, you can call a suite of tools such as scrape_website for single-URL content extraction in multiple formats, search_web for parser-based web results, answers for AI-powered responses with citations, batch_scrape_urls for large-scale URL scraping, and create_crawl to autonomously discover and scrape entire sites. The server is designed to be run from environments like Claude Desktop, Windsurf, Cursor, Metorial, or any MCP client that can talk to an MCP server using the standard command transport. You’ll typically provide an OLOSTEP_API_KEY to authenticate and, depending on the tool, optional parameters such as country routing, wait times, and specific parsers.

Prerequisites:

• Node.js (LTS) and npm installed on your system, or access to a container runtime for Docker usage.
• An Olostep API key (OLOSTEP_API_KEY) from your Olostep account.

Option 1: Run via npx (recommended)

• Ensure Node.js and npm are installed.
• Install and run the MCP server via npx:

# Replace with your API key
export OLOSTEP_API_KEY=YOUR_API_KEY_HERE
npx -y olostep-mcp

Option 2: Docker (recommended for isolation)

• Pull and run the Docker image with your API key:

docker pull olostep/mcp-server

docker run -i --rm \
  -e OLOSTEP_API_KEY="your-api-key" \
  olostep/mcp-server

Option 3: Local build from source (if you’re developing)

• Clone the repository, install dependencies, and run locally:

git clone https://github.com/olostep/olostep-mcp-server.git
cd olostep-mcp-server
npm install
npm run build
npm start

Option 4: Install globally via npm (optional)

• Install the MCP package globally to use npx without the network fetch:

npm install -g olostep-mcp

After installation, you can start with:

export OLOSTEP_API_KEY=YOUR_API_KEY_HERE
npx -y olostep-mcp

Environment variables and configuration tips:

• OLOSTEP_API_KEY is required for most operations. Set it in your shell or in the MCP server config as shown above.
• ORBIT_KEY is an optional key for using Orbit as a request router; add it if you rely on Orbit routing.
• When running in container environments, prefer passing OLOSTEP_API_KEY via -e OLOSTEP_API_KEY=your-key for security and environment isolation.
• The available tools include: scrape_website (single URL, multiple output formats, optional parser), search_web (parser-based web search with structured results), answers (AI-powered responses with sources and citations), batch_scrape_urls (up to 10k URLs), and create_crawl (autonomous site crawling). You can tune parameters like country codes, wait_before_scraping, output_format, and parser per tool.
• The CLI and MCP client expectations assume the server is reachable via stdio transport in several examples; adapt transport method if your client uses a different mechanism.