Bookshelf

Part of the arr-mcps collection. MCP server exposing Bookshelf's v1 REST API (a Readarr fork, OpenAPI 3.0.1) as tools, so an LLM can read and manage a Bookshelf instance: authors, books, book files, editions, series, the download queue, history, indexers, import lists, custom formats, tags, commands, system status, and more. Full surface — reads and writes, with destructive tools flagged.

Built with FastMCP.

Getting an API key

Generate one in Bookshelf Settings > General > Security. Auth is the X-Api-Key header.

Install

Download a wheel from the latest release and install it as a uv tool (no repo checkout needed):

uv tool install bookshelf_mcp-*.whl

This puts a bookshelf-mcp command on your PATH. Register it with Claude Code:

claude mcp add bookshelf \
  --env BOOKSHELF_URL=http://your-bookshelf-host:8787 \
  --env BOOKSHELF_API_KEY=<key> \
  -- bookshelf-mcp

From source

uv sync
cp .env.example .env   # fill in BOOKSHELF_URL and BOOKSHELF_API_KEY

claude mcp add bookshelf \
  --env BOOKSHELF_URL=http://your-bookshelf-host:8787 \
  --env BOOKSHELF_API_KEY=<key> \
  -- uv run --directory /path/to/bookshelf-mcp bookshelf-mcp

Config

Env var	Required	Default
BOOKSHELF_URL	yes	-
BOOKSHELF_API_KEY	yes*	none (no X-Api-Key header sent if unset)

* Every API endpoint requires auth; practically you must set it, but the server still starts without one so errors surface from the API rather than at startup.

Tools

15 resource-scoped tools, each covering multiple Bookshelf v1 endpoints (221 total) via an operation parameter. Call a tool with operation set to one of its listed operations and an arguments dict matching that operation's parameters — the tool's own description (visible to your MCP client) lists every operation, its signature, and a one-line doc. This keeps the full REST surface available while costing a fraction of the context budget of registering all 221 endpoints as separate tools.

Tool	Operations	Kind
bookshelf_profiles_formats	40	reads + writes
bookshelf_media_library	33	reads + writes
bookshelf_config	27	reads + writes
bookshelf_system_commands	20	reads + writes
bookshelf_notifications_metadata	18	reads + writes
bookshelf_download_clients	16	reads + writes
bookshelf_import_lists	16	reads + writes
bookshelf_indexers	11	reads + writes
bookshelf_storage	9	reads + writes
bookshelf_history_blocklist	7	reads + writes
bookshelf_queue	7	reads + writes
bookshelf_tags	7	reads + writes
bookshelf_wanted	4	read-only
bookshelf_release_search	4	reads + writes
bookshelf_calendar	2	read-only

Example: bookshelf_queue(operation="bookshelf_delete_queue", arguments={"id": 42}). Endpoint-level naming (bookshelf_<verb>_<resource>) is preserved as the operation value, so the full endpoint list is still discoverable from each group tool's description at runtime.

Development

make help  # list all commands

Command	Does
make sync	uv sync
make test	Offline tests - one per endpoint, mocked HTTP
make test-integration	Tests against the live instance (needs BOOKSHELF_URL/BOOKSHELF_API_KEY)
make build	Build wheel + sdist into dist/
make bump-patch / bump-minor / bump-major	Bump the version in pyproject.toml + uv.lock
make clean	Remove build artifacts

The release workflow (.github/workflows/release.yml) builds and publishes to Releases whenever a v* tag is pushed - so the usual flow is make bump-patch, commit, then tag and push.

The integration suite is read-only by default (GET endpoints only). Set BOOKSHELF_WRITE_TESTS=1 to also exercise POST/PUT/DELETE against a scratch tag (created, updated, then deleted). Never run write tests against a production library.