Engineering Standards

You deploy and use an MCP server to manage engineering standards, practices, and processes. This server provides AI assistants with structured access to your knowledge base through a standardized REST interface, enabling fast search, CRUD operations, and flexible output formats for JSON or Markdown.

How to use

Connect your MCP client to the server using the HTTP endpoint or a local process. You can browse, search, retrieve, create, and update standards. Use full-text search to find relevant principles, standards, or practices, and rely on in-memory indexing for fast responses. Output can be returned in JSON or Markdown, depending on your client preferences.

How to install

Prerequisites: Node.js >= 18.0.0 and npm.

Step 1: Open your terminal and navigate to the project directory.

# Change to your project directory
cd engineering-standards-mcp-server

Step 2: Install dependencies.

npm install

Step 3: Start the server in development mode for auto-reload during development, or use production mode for a standard run.

npm run dev

npm start

Step 4: Verify the server is running and accessible at the default MCP URL.

Server running on http://localhost:3000/mcp
Health check: http://localhost:3000/health

Configuration

You can customize the server behavior with environment variables. The examples below show how to change the listening port and the standards directory.

# Change server port (default: 3000)
PORT=3001 npm start

# Change standards directory (default: ./standards)
STANDARDS_DIR="C:\path\to\standards" npm start

Notes on file structure and naming

Standards follow a consistent naming convention to support organized storage and easy retrieval. Each file or entry should reflect type, tier, process, a descriptive slug, and a status flag.

Available tools

list_standards

Browse all standards organized by type, tier, and process with optional filters and output in JSON or Markdown.

get_standard

Retrieve a specific standard by file path or metadata, returning full content with metadata.

search_standards

Perform a full-text search across all standards with optional filters and a relevance-ranked output.

get_standards_metadata

Query metadata only without fetching the full content, with optional filters.

create_standard

Create a new standard with automatic validation and file naming.

update_standard

Update an existing standard with a version bump and new content.