CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing In General

Our project welcomes external contributions. If you have an itch, please feel free to scratch it.

For more details on the contributing guidelines head to the Docling Project community repository.

Developing

Clone the project

Clone this project on your local machine with git. For instance, if using an SSH key, run:

git clone git@github.com:docling-project/docling-mcp.git

Ensure that your user name and email are properly set:

git config list

Usage of uv

We use uv as package and project manager.

Installation

To install uv, check the documentation on Installing uv.

Create an environment and sync it

You can use the uv sync to create a project virtual environment (if it does not already exist) and sync the project's dependencies with the environment.

uv sync --all-extras

Use a specific Python version (optional)

If you need to work with a specific version of Python, you can create a new virtual environment for that version and run the sync command:

uv venv --python 3.12
uv sync

More detailed options are described on the Using Python environments documentation.

Add a new dependency

Simply use the uv add command. The pyproject.toml and uv.lock files will be updated.

uv add [OPTIONS] <PACKAGES|--requirements <REQUIREMENTS>>

Using Docling MCP in development mode

After installing the dependencies (uv sync), you can expose the tools of Docling by running

uv run docling-mcp-server

Code sytle guidelines

We use the following tools to enforce code style:

• Ruff, as linter and code formatter
• MyPy, as static type checker

A set of styling checks, as well as regression tests, are defined and managed through the pre-commit framework. To ensure that those scripts run automatically before a commit is finalized, install pre-commit on your local repository:

uv run pre-commit install

To run the checks on-demand, type:

uv run pre-commit run --all-files