mcp-ansc-server

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that exposes Moldova's National Agency for Solving Complaints (ANSC, Agenția Națională pentru Soluționarea Contestațiilor) public-procurement data — appeals, decisions, hearing schedule, and PDF documents — to LLMs and other MCP clients.

Conformant with MCP spec 2025-11-25 and the TypeScript SDK 1.29.x. Published with Sigstore provenance via npm OIDC trusted publishing.

Quickstart

npx -y mcp-ansc-server

That's it — no install needed. The server speaks stdio and is ready for any MCP client to spawn it.

For Claude Desktop, drop this into your config:

// ~/.config/claude-desktop/config.json (Linux/macOS) or %APPDATA%\Claude\config.json (Windows)
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ansc": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "mcp-ansc-server"]
    }
  }
}

Same shape works in Cursor, Continue, Zed, and any other stdio-MCP host.

Table of contents

• What it ships
  • Tools (12)
  • Prompts (3)
  • Resources
• Transports
• Authentication (optional)
• Configuration
• Running it
• Wiring into MCP clients
• Operational notes
• Project layout
• Releasing
• Project meta

What it ships

Tools (12)

Search (4)

| name | what it does | |---|---| | search_appeals | Filter appeals by year / contracting authority / challenger / OCDS procedure ID / status. Paginated, 30 items per page. | | search_decisions | Filter decisions by year / authority / challenger / procurement object / decision status / decision content / appeal grounds (the 42-ground catalog) / complaint object / appeal number. Paginated. | | search_orders | Procedural orders ("încheieri") issued during a case. kind="general" (default) or kind="suspension" (incheieri-de-suspendare). | | search_suspended_decisions | Court-suspended decisions (decizii-suspendate-{year}). The authoritative signal that a court has paused enforcement of an ANSC ruling. |

Direct lookup (3)

| name | what it does | |---|---| | get_appeal_by_registration | Direct lookup by 02/1245/24-style number. Year is parsed from the suffix; pages are scanned with bounded concurrency (cached). | | get_decision_by_number | Direct lookup by 03D-962-24-style number. | | get_procurement_history | Given an OCDS procurement ID, return every appeal and every decision tied to that tender. The OCDS timestamp seeds the year range we scan. |

Hearing schedule (3)

| name | what it does | |---|---| | list_upcoming_hearings | All days for which ANSC has published a hearing agenda. | | get_hearings_for_day | The agenda for a specific day (by URL or ISO date) — list of cases with time, parties, registration number, object, panel. | | find_hearing_for_appeal | The "when is my hearing?" feature — scans every published agenda day for a matching appeal registration number. |

Documents (2)

| name | what it does | |---|---| | check_decision_court_status | Looks up a decision and cross-checks the suspended-decisions listing. Returns { decision, suspension, isSuspended }. Closes a real correctness gap: search_decisions alone can report decisionStatus: "În vigoare" for items a court has since suspended. | | fetch_ansc_decision | Download an ANSC decision PDF and return its content. Native-text PDFs return extracted text. Scanned PDFs (Canon/HP/etc., common for older filings — typically with broken Unicode CMap that maps Romanian to garbled Cyrillic) return per-page JPEG image content blocks for the host vision-LLM to OCR — language-agnostic, no local Tesseract install. Force a path with mode: 'auto' \| 'text' \| 'image'. Uses unpdf.extractImages (raster bytes already embedded — no canvas backend needed) + sharp for re-encoding. |

What every tool guarantees

• declares both inputSchema (Zod) and outputSchema (Zod), so clients receive validated structuredContent alongside the human-readable text;
• carries the right tool annotations (readOnlyHint: true, idempotentHint: true, openWorldHint: true|false, title);
• honors cancellation via the AbortSignal from the SDK;
• normalizes Romanian dates to ISO 8601 (entryDateIso, dateIso) alongside the original dd/mm/yyyy;
• strips trailing punctuation from appealNumber / registrationNumber;
• emits notifications/progress for long PDF downloads.

Prompts (3)

Pre-canned LLM workflows that clients surface as slash-commands:

| name | args | what it sets the LLM up to do | |---|---|---| | summarize_ansc_decision | identifier (decision number or ELO URL) | Fetch the decision and produce a structured Romanian/English summary: parties / procurement / grounds / ruling / legal basis / status. | | procurement_audit | procedureNumber (OCDS ID) | Walk through get_procurement_history and produce a chronological narrative of every appeal + decision (with PDF reads when needed). | | compare_appeals | firstRegistration, secondRegistration | Side-by-side comparison: parties, grounds, outcomes, divergences. |

Resources

Static shortcuts:

• ansc://appeals/current — current-year appeals, page 0
• ansc://decisions/current — current-year decisions, page 0

RFC 6570 templates with complete callbacks for year (2014→current) and page (0→20):

• ansc://appeals/{year}
• ansc://appeals/{year}/page/{page}
• ansc://decisions/{year}
• ansc://decisions/{year}/page/{page}

Transports

Two transports, chosen via MCP_TRANSPORT:

• stdio (default) — for desktop / IDE clients (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Continue, Zed, …) that spawn the server as a subprocess.
• http — Streamable HTTP per spec 2025-03-26+, with stateful sessions (Mcp-Session-Id header), SSE streaming on GET /mcp, session resumability via Last-Event-ID. DNS-rebinding protection is enabled automatically when binding to localhost.

Authentication (optional)

ANSC's data is public — anyone can browse https://www.ansc.md. The default deployment shape is MCP_TRANSPORT=stdio (or http with AUTH_MODE=none behind a trusted reverse proxy / Tailscale).

OAuth here only protects the server itself from abuse, not the data. If you deploy this on the open internet and want per-principal rate limiting and audit logs, set MCP_TRANSPORT=http and AUTH_MODE=oauth. The server then runs as an OAuth 2.1 Resource Server per spec 2025-11-25:

• publishes RFC 9728 Protected Resource Metadata at /.well-known/oauth-protected-resource;
• validates Bearer JWTs with jose against the issuer's JWKS;
• enforces the aud claim per RFC 8707 (the audience must be HTTP_PUBLIC_URL) — token passthrough is forbidden by spec and rejected here;
• on missing/invalid token, returns 401 with WWW-Authenticate: Bearer resource_metadata="…".

The MCP server itself is only a Resource Server. Bring any OAuth 2.1 Authorization Server (Auth0, Keycloak, Logto, Hanko, Cognito with static client IDs, …).

Testing the OAuth integration

# Inspect the published metadata
curl -fsSL https://mcp.example.com/.well-known/oauth-protected-resource | jq

# Successful call
TOKEN=…
curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  --data '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"initialize","params":{"protocolVersion":"2025-11-25","capabilities":{},"clientInfo":{"name":"curl","version":"0"}}}' \
  https://mcp.example.com/mcp

# Hit /mcp without a token to see the spec-compliant 401 + WWW-Authenticate
curl -i https://mcp.example.com/mcp

Configuration

All env vars are documented in .env.example. Highlights:

MCP_TRANSPORT=stdio|http
HTTP_HOST=127.0.0.1
HTTP_PORT=3030
HTTP_PUBLIC_URL=https://mcp.example.com   # required when AUTH_MODE=oauth
AUTH_MODE=none|oauth
OAUTH_ISSUER=https://auth.example.com     # required when AUTH_MODE=oauth
OAUTH_REQUIRED_SCOPES=mcp:read

ANSC_HTTP_TIMEOUT_MS=30000
ANSC_TLS_BYPASS_HOSTS=www.ansc.md,elo.ansc.md   # ANSC's cert is invalid
ANSC_USER_AGENT="…"

CACHE_TTL_CURRENT_S=300       # 5 min
CACHE_TTL_HISTORICAL_S=86400  # 24 h
CACHE_MAX_ENTRIES=500

LOG_LEVEL=info

Config is parsed by Zod at startup; misconfigured envs fail fast.

Running it

From npm (recommended)

npx -y mcp-ansc-server                # one-shot, no install
# or
npm install -g mcp-ansc-server
mcp-ansc-server                        # uses the bin
# or
MCP_TRANSPORT=http npx -y mcp-ansc-server   # Streamable HTTP on :3030

From source

git clone [email protected]:nalyk/ansc-mcp-server.git
cd ansc-mcp-server
nvm use                                # honors .nvmrc (Node 24)
npm ci
npm run build
npm start                              # stdio
npm run start:http                     # MCP_TRANSPORT=http
npm run inspect                        # MCP Inspector against the built server

In Docker

docker build -t mcp-ansc-server .
docker run -i --rm mcp-ansc-server     # stdio (typical MCP usage)
docker run --rm -p 3030:3030 \
  -e MCP_TRANSPORT=http -e HTTP_HOST=0.0.0.0 \
  mcp-ansc-server                      # Streamable HTTP

The image is multi-stage node:24-alpine, runs as a non-root mcp user.

Wiring into MCP clients

Claude Desktop / Cursor / Continue / Zed (stdio)

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ansc": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "mcp-ansc-server"]
    }
  }
}

For a pinned version (recommended for stability):

"args": ["-y", "[email protected]"]

As a remote (Streamable HTTP)

Put the server behind TLS (caddy / nginx / Cloudflare Tunnel / fly.io). Point the MCP client at https://mcp.example.com/mcp. If AUTH_MODE=oauth, the client must include the resource parameter (RFC 8707) when exchanging tokens, with value https://mcp.example.com.

Operational notes

• Logs are JSON on stderr (pino, level via LOG_LEVEL). Stdout is reserved for the MCP wire. Any code path that writes to stdout in stdio mode is a bug — please file it.
• Outbound HTTP uses undici with a single hostname-pinned TLS-bypass agent (only ANSC_TLS_BYPASS_HOSTS skip cert validation; everything else is verified normally). Retries on 5xx / ECONNRESET / socket / header / body timeouts with exponential backoff + jitter, capped at 3 attempts; honors Retry-After on 429.
• Caching — HTML responses are cached in-process via lru-cache, year- tiered: 5 min TTL for the current year (active data), 24 h for historical years (rarely changes). Configurable.
• PDF extraction — for native-text PDFs, returns extracted text. For scanned PDFs, returns embedded page images for the host vision-LLM to OCR. The heuristic detector triggers on scanner-brand producer strings, low char/byte density, zero Romanian diacritics in a multi-page body, or per-page text under 80 chars. No local Tesseract install required.
• HTML parser matches columns by <th> text first (resilient to ANSC reordering); falls back to positional with parserMode: 'partial' flag in tool output, so callers can detect when ANSC's layout has drifted.

Project layout

src/
  index.ts                    # bootstrap — picks transport, wires shutdown
  config.ts                   # Zod env schema
  logging.ts                  # pino on stderr (+ errMsg helper)
  api/
    ansc-client.ts            # undici + retries + lru-cache + lookups
    pdf-fetcher.ts            # PDF download + unpdf text/image extract + sharp JPEG
  handlers/
    tools.ts                  # 12 tools — Zod input/output, annotations
    resources.ts              # RFC 6570 templates + completions
    prompts.ts                # 3 LLM workflow templates
  http/
    server.ts                 # Express + StreamableHTTPServerTransport (stateful)
    auth.ts                   # JoseTokenVerifier + PRM router (opt-in)
  models/
    appeals.ts                # AppealStatus + Zod
    decisions.ts              # Decision enums + Zod
    orders.ts                 # Order (încheieri) + Zod
    suspended.ts              # SuspendedDecision + Zod
    hearings.ts               # Hearing / HearingDay + Zod
    pagination.ts             # Pagination + Zod
  utils/
    html-parser.ts            # parseTable<T,F> generic — header-name + positional
    identifiers.ts            # Romanian id + date helpers (incl. OCDS timestamp)
    retry.ts                  # exponential backoff with jitter
__tests__/
  fixtures/*.html             # synthetic ANSC pages for parser tests
  *.test.ts                   # html-parser, identifiers, config — 16 tests
.github/workflows/
  ci.yml                      # tsc + jest + audit + Dockerfile smoke
  publish.yml                 # tag-driven OIDC publish to npm + GitHub Release
  dependabot.yml              # weekly npm + actions updates
Dockerfile                    # node:24-alpine, multi-stage, non-root

Releasing

Releases are tag-driven and fully automated via OIDC trusted publishing — no static NPM_TOKEN involved.

npm version patch -m "Release v%s"     # bumps package.json + lockfile, creates v* tag
git push origin main --follow-tags     # triggers .github/workflows/publish.yml

The workflow runs tsc, tests, build, then publishes to npm with auto-Sigstore provenance and creates the matching GitHub Release with auto-generated notes. The tag↔package.json version drift is caught up front; re-runs are idempotent.

Project meta

• npm: mcp-ansc-server
• Releases: github.com/…/releases
• Changelog: CHANGELOG.md
• Security policy: SECURITY.md — please report vulnerabilities via GitHub private vulnerability reporting, not public issues.
• License: MIT © 2026 Ion Nalyk Calmis
• MCP spec: 2025-11-25
• TypeScript SDK: @modelcontextprotocol/sdk ≥ 1.29.0