File Analysis MCP Server

This Model Context Protocol (MCP) server provides tools for reading and writing files, analyzing data (especially CSV files), generating visualizations, and reading PDF files - all accessible to any MCP client like Claude Desktop.

Features

File Operations

• Read and write text files securely
• List files in directories matching patterns
• Get detailed file information (size, creation time, etc.)
• Extract text content from PDF files

Data Analysis

• Read and sample CSV files
• Analyze CSV data with detailed statistics
• Visualize data with various plot types (bar, line, scatter, histogram, boxplot)

Included Prompts

• Analyze Data File - Comprehensive data analysis
• Data Cleaning Steps - Identifying and fixing data issues
• Generate Summary Report - Executive summary for stakeholders
• Exploratory Data Analysis - Detailed EDA workflow

Installation

Prerequisites

• Python 3.10 or higher
• Claude Desktop or another MCP client

Setup

1. Install dependencies:

pip install "mcp[cli]" pandas numpy matplotlib PyPDF2

1. Set up safe directories (optional):

# Default directories are ~/Documents and ~/Downloads
# To customize, set this environment variable:
export MCP_FILE_ROOTS="~/Documents:~/Desktop:~/Downloads"

1. Install in Claude Desktop:

mcp install file_analysis_server.py

Usage with Claude Desktop

Once installed, you can ask Claude questions like:

• "Can you list the files in my Documents folder?"
• "Read the content of ~/Documents/example.txt for me"
• "Extract text from my ~/Documents/report.pdf file"
• "Read page 5 of my PDF document"
• "Analyze the data in ~/Downloads/sample.csv"
• "Create a bar chart of the 'Sales' column from my CSV file"
• "Write a summary report of my quarterly_sales.csv file"

Security

The server enforces strict path validation to ensure only files within authorized directories can be accessed. By default, these are limited to ~/Documents and ~/Downloads.

Configuration

You can adjust the allowed directories by setting the MCP_FILE_ROOTS environment variable. Multiple directories should be separated by colons, for example:

mcp install file_analysis_server.py -v MCP_FILE_ROOTS="~/Documents:~/Desktop:~/projects/data"

Development

For development and testing:

mcp dev file_analysis_server.py

This will start the server with the MCP Inspector interface for interactive testing.

Examples

Reading a file

Could you read the content of ~/Documents/notes.txt?

Reading a PDF file

Can you extract the text from ~/Documents/report.pdf?

Reading specific pages from a PDF

Please read pages 3 and 5 from ~/Downloads/manual.pdf

Analyzing CSV data

I have a CSV file at ~/Downloads/sales_data.csv. Could you analyze it and tell me about the 'Revenue' column?

Creating a visualization

Using my ~/Documents/monthly_data.csv file, can you create a bar chart showing 'Month' vs 'Profit'?

Using prompts

Can you run an exploratory data analysis on ~/Downloads/customer_data.csv?