MinerU Document Explorer

Agent-native knowledge engine — search, deep-read, and build knowledge bases
from Markdown, PDF, DOCX, and PPTX.

中文文档 · MCP Setup · CLI Reference · Demo · Contributing

---

🤔 Why MinerU Document Explorer?

MinerU Document Explorer equips your agent with three tool suites — Retrieve, Deep Read, and Ingest — closing the full knowledge loop:

• 🔍 Retrieve — Cross-collection search: BM25, vector, and hybrid with LLM reranking and query expansion
• 📖 Deep Read — Navigate inside a single document without loading the whole file: table of contents, section reading, inline search, and element extraction
• 📝 Ingest — Build and maintain a LLM wiki from raw documents, following the Karpathy LLM Wiki pattern

Developed by the MinerU team, building on QMD and Karpathy's LLM Wiki.

💡 What can you do with it?

• Research assistant — Point it at a folder of PDFs and ask your AI agent to survey the literature, compare methods, or find specific results across papers
• Project knowledge base — Index your codebase, docs, and design specs; let the agent answer questions about architecture, find relevant code, or trace requirements
• Study companion — Upload textbooks or lecture notes; use doc_toc + doc_read to navigate, doc_grep to search, and build a wiki of key concepts
• Enterprise document search — Index contracts, reports, or manuals and search them with natural language queries enhanced by LLM reranking

See it in action: The demo/ folder contains a complete end-to-end example — an AI agent automatically reads ~10 arXiv papers on RAG, builds an interlinked wiki knowledge base, and writes a research survey. See the Demo Guide for step-by-step instructions.

🚀 Quick Start

Agent-Assisted Setup: If you're using an AI agent (Claude Code, Cursor, etc.), simply ask it to help you deploy MinerU Document Explorer and install skills — the agent can handle the entire setup process for you, including MCP configuration.

Follow the https://github.com/opendatalab/MinerU-Document-Explorer/blob/main/docs/quickstart.md to install MinerU Document Explorer and walk the user through configuration.

📖 Document Deep Reading

Navigate and search within a single document without reading the whole file:

# View document structure
qmd doc-toc papers/attention-is-all-you-need.pdf

# Read specific sections by address
qmd doc-read papers/attention-is-all-you-need.pdf "line:45-120"

# Search within one document
qmd doc-grep papers/attention-is-all-you-need.pdf "self-attention"

🔌 MCP Server — 15 Tools for AI Agents

Integrate with AI agents via Model Context Protocol.

MCP Server vs CLI: The MCP server runs as a persistent process — LLM models (embeddings, reranker, query expansion) are loaded once and stay in memory across requests. CLI commands like qmd query must reload all models on every invocation, adding ~5–15 s of startup overhead each time. For agent workflows, always prefer the MCP server.

Two transport modes:

Mode	Command	Best for
stdio	qmd mcp	Claude Desktop, Claude Code — client spawns and manages the process
HTTP daemon	qmd mcp --http --daemon	Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code, multi-client setups — one shared persistent server

# Start the HTTP daemon (recommended — models stay loaded across all requests)
qmd mcp --http --daemon             # default port 8181
qmd mcp --http --daemon --port 8080 # custom port

# Verify server is running
curl http://localhost:8181/health

# Stop the daemon
qmd mcp stop

Client Configuration

Cursor — add to .cursor/mcp.json (project) or ~/.cursor/mcp.json (global)

Option A — stdio (Cursor manages the process lifecycle):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "qmd": {
      "command": "qmd",
      "args": ["mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Option B — HTTP (run qmd mcp --http --daemon first; models stay loaded, faster responses):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "qmd": {
      "url": "http://localhost:8181/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Claude Desktop — add to ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "qmd": {
      "command": "qmd",
      "args": ["mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Claude Code — add to ~/.claude/settings.json or run claude mcp add qmd -- qmd mcp

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "qmd": {
      "command": "qmd",
      "args": ["mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Windsurf / VS Code / Other MCP Clients

For stdio transport, use "command": "qmd", "args": ["mcp"] in your client's MCP configuration.

For HTTP transport, start qmd mcp --http --daemon and point your client to http://localhost:8181/mcp.

See MCP setup guide for all 15 tools and HTTP transport details.

Agent Skills

MinerU Document Explorer ships with a built-in Agent Skill that teaches AI agents how to use the full tool suite effectively — decision trees, usage patterns, and best practices for all 15 MCP tools.

# Install the skill (works with both npm and source installs)
qmd skill install              # local project (.agents/skills/)
qmd skill install --global     # global (~/.agents/skills/)

# Or from source repo
claude skill add ./skills/mineru-document-explorer/SKILL.md

📊 How It Compares

	MinerU Doc Explorer	LlamaIndex	Obsidian	NotebookLM
Runs 100% locally	✅	⚠️ LLM APIs	✅	❌ Cloud
Agent integration (MCP)	15 tools	Plugin	❌	❌
Deep reading within docs	✅	❌	❌	✅
Wiki knowledge compilation	✅	❌	Manual	❌
Formats	MD, PDF, DOCX, PPTX	Many	MD	PDF, URL
Search pipeline	BM25 + vec + rerank	Configurable	Basic	Proprietary
Zero-config search	✅ qmd search	❌	Plugin	N/A
Open source	MIT	MIT	Partial	❌

⚙️ Requirements

Requirement	Notes
Node.js >= 22 or Bun	Runtime
Python >= 3.10	Document processing (pymupdf, python-docx, python-pptx)
macOS	brew install sqlite for extension support

📄 Document Processing Setup

Python 3.10+ is required for document processing (PDF, DOCX, PPTX):

# Check Python version
python3 --version  # needs >= 3.10

# Install required Python packages
pip install pymupdf python-docx python-pptx

# Verify
python3 -c "import pymupdf; import docx; import pptx; print('OK')"

MinerU Cloud — high-quality PDF extraction for scanned documents and complex layouts (optional)

pip install mineru-open-sdk
export MINERU_API_KEY="your-key"  # get from https://mineru.net

When MINERU_API_KEY is set, MinerU Cloud is automatically used as the primary PDF provider with PyMuPDF as fallback.

For advanced configuration (custom providers, local VLM models, GPT PageIndex), create ~/.config/qmd/doc-reading.json:

{
  "docReading": {
    "providers": {
      "fullText": { "pdf": ["mineru_cloud", "pymupdf"] }
    },
    "credentials": {
      "mineru": { "api_key": "your-api-key" }
    }
  }
}

🤖 LLM Models (auto-downloaded on first use)

Model	Purpose	Size
embeddinggemma-300M	Vector embeddings	~300 MB
qwen3-reranker-0.6b	Re-ranking	~640 MB
qmd-query-expansion-1.7B	Query expansion	~1.1 GB

Models are only needed for qmd embed, qmd vsearch, and qmd query. qmd search runs BM25 retrieval.

📚 Documentation

🎯 Demo Guide	End-to-end example: agent-driven RAG research survey
📖 CLI Reference	All commands, options, output formats
🔌 MCP Server	Setup, 15 tools, HTTP transport
📦 SDK / Library	TypeScript API, types, examples
🏗️ Architecture	Search pipeline, scoring, data schema, chunking
🤝 Contributing	Development setup, code style, how to contribute

❤️ Acknowledgments

MinerU Document Explorer builds upon these foundational projects:

• QMD by Tobi Lutke — An on-device search engine and CLI toolkit for markdown documents
• LLM Wiki by Andrej Karpathy — the conceptual pattern for LLM-maintained knowledge bases
• MinerU by OpenDataLab — high-quality document parsing and extraction

---

📝 Changelog

v1 — 2026-04-07 (Current)

Rebuilt from an OpenClaw agent skill into a full agent-native knowledge engine: npm package (npm install -g mineru-document-explorer), qmd CLI, MCP server with 15 tools across three groups (Retrieval / Deep Reading / Knowledge Ingestion), multi-format support (MD, PDF, DOCX, PPTX), hybrid search (BM25 + vector + LLM reranking), and LLM Wiki knowledge base pattern.

v0 — 2026-03-30 (Previous)

OpenClaw-native agent skill (doc-search CLI). Four capabilities: Logic Retrieval, Semantic Retrieval, Keyword Retrieval, Evidence Extraction. See the v0 repository.