io.github.cyanheads/ris-austria-mcp-server

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Overview

RIS is the Austrian government's official legal database: consolidated federal, state, and municipal law, case law from every Austrian court and tribunal, the authentic gazettes whose promulgated text is binding under Austrian law, the pre-parliamentary lawmaking pipeline, and ministerial decrees. This server wraps the keyless RIS OGD REST API (v2.6, CC BY 4.0), covering all 39 OGD applications and reaching back to the Reichsgesetzblatt of 1848; every response labels the document's binding status, since only the amtssignierte gazette wording is legally binding. Runs as a stdio process, a local Streamable HTTP server, or the public hosted endpoint above.

Tools

Tool	Description
ris_search_legislation	Search consolidated federal, state, and municipal law, one document per §/Artikel/Anlage, filtered to the version in force on a given date (defaults to today). Also serves English translations of selected laws.
ris_search_case_law	Search Austrian case law (Judikatur), one court or tribunal per call: VfGH, VwGH, ordinary courts, BVwG, LVwG, DSB, the party-transparency senate, and ten more.
ris_search_gazette	Browse the promulgation record at every level of government: federal (three era tiers back to 1848, auto-routed), state law and ordinance gazettes, district, and municipal.
ris_search_drafts	Search the federal lawmaking pipeline: ministerial drafts in public review (Begutachtungsentwürfe) and government bills (Regierungsvorlagen).
ris_search_announcements	Search sectoral official gazettes and executive documents: social-insurance notices, veterinary notices, court rules, trade-exam regulations, health structure plans, ministerial decrees, council-of-ministers minutes.
ris_lookup_citation	Resolve one Austrian legal citation ("§ 6 DSG", "BGBl. I Nr. 165/1999", "RGBl. Nr. 189/1902", a Geschäftszahl, "VfSlg 19.632/2012") to its canonical document.
ris_get_document	Fetch one document's full text as markdown/HTML/XML, or its export URLs, with binding-status labeling and the authentic PDF wherever one exists.
ris_track_changes	Per-application change feed: every document added or changed in a date window, deletions included.
ris_list_reference	Ground the domain vocabulary offline: applications and coverage windows, court codes, Bundesländer, decision kinds, ministries, district authorities, gazette eras and parts, citation formats, search syntax.

Resources

Resource	Description
ris://document/{application}/{documentNumber}	Markdown text of one RIS document — injectable twin of ris_get_document

All resource data is also reachable via tools — clients without resource support use ris_get_document.

Capability reference

ris_search_legislation _tool

• Full-text query using RIS boolean grammar: UND/ODER/NICHT or AND/OR/NOT, parentheses, quoted phrases
• title matches the title, short title, or abbreviation ("DSG", "ABGB")
• scope routes to one of three applications — BrKons (federal), LrKons (state), Gr (municipal); municipality narrows a state scope to municipal law (selected norms, six Bundesländer)
• language: english serves the Erv collection of selected English translations
• in_force_as_of defaults to today. Omitting the date upstream silently searches all historical versions, so include_all_versions is the explicit opt-in and the applied date is echoed in every response
• Force-window filters (entered_force_from/to, left_force_from/to) track provisions entering or leaving force in a date range
• Section-range filtering via section_from/section_to/section_type (§, Artikel, Anlage)
• Law-level grouping via law_id (Gesetzesnummer), plus Systematik index and changed_since windows
• Output per document: section label, in-force date, ELI, parsed CELEX references, and export URLs (XML/HTML/PDF/RTF)

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ris_search_case_law _tool

• court is required and takes one application per call: vfgh, vwgh, justiz, bvwg, lvwg, dsk, upts (party-transparency senate), plus ten historical and specialized tribunals. Cross-court research fans out one call per court
• Filter by cited provision (norm, e.g. "DSG §1", "DSGVO Art32"), exact case number (case_number, Geschäftszahl), decision date range, decision kind (Erkenntnis/Beschluss/…), and full-text query
• decision_type targets headnotes (Rechtssätze), full decision texts, or both
• Court-conditional filters: issuing_body (dsk/dok/pvak/verg), court_name, legal_area, subject_area (justiz, e.g. "Datenschutzrecht"), state (lvwg/uvs), collection_number (VfSlg/VwSlg cites), party (upts), commission/senate/discrimination ground (gbk), media statute (bks)
• Output per decision: case numbers, decision date, ECLI, cited norms, keywords, the guiding principle (Leitsatz) on headnote documents, and headnote/decision URLs

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ris_search_gazette _tool

• scope: federal, one of the nine Bundesländer, district (Bezirksverwaltungsbehörden), or municipal (authentic municipal promulgations)
• Federal history is one logical series auto-routed across three era tiers: BgblAuth (2004+, authentic), BgblPdf (Staats- und Bundesgesetzblatt 1945–2003), and BgblAlt (Reichs-, Staats- und Bundesgesetzblatt 1848–1940, metadata plus ÖNB-hosted scans). Each response names the tier that served it
• One call serves one tier, so a date range crossing 2004-01-01 or 1945-01-01 is rejected with the boundary to split at rather than answered from one side of it. RIS carries no federal gazette for 1941–1944
• Filter by publication date range, gazette part (BGBl. I/II/III, or pre_1997 for the partless era), document type, issuing ministry, district authority, or municipality
• State scopes serve the authentic Landesgesetzblätter by default. series: ordinance_gazette switches to the Verordnungsblätter; state_era: legacy selects the state's earlier non-authentic series (Niederösterreich's systematic LgblNO, or the historical Lgbl elsewhere)
• Point lookup by gazette number ("BGBl. II Nr. 171/2026" or "171/2026")
• Every record carries a binding label (authentic, historical_record, or consolidated_informational) and the amtssigniert PDF URL when present. The metadata-only 1848–1940 gazettes link to their ÖNB ALEX scan
• For a single known gazette number, ris_lookup_citation is the more direct route

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ris_search_drafts _tool

• stage: review_drafts covers ministerial drafts in public review (Begutachtungsentwürfe). in_review_on answers what is in review on a given date
• stage: government_bills covers bills adopted by the council of ministers (Regierungsvorlagen, 2004+), filtered by adoption date
• ministry accepts the abbreviation ("BMF") and the server expands it to RIS's exact designation
• Output includes review deadlines, council adoption dates, and the RIS web view
• materials lists the companion documents filed with the draft — Erläuterungen (the drafting reasoning the bill text omits), Textgegenüberstellung, Vorblatt/WFA, covering letter, annexes. Their filenames are opaque and per-record, so passing a materials[].url to ris_get_document is the only way to read one; format there picks the rendition, so the one URL reaches every text rendition the companion has. Where RIS files no HTML rendition — about one companion in eight, nearly all covering letters — the URL is the PDF, which is a download rather than a text rendition

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ris_search_announcements _tool

• collection: social_insurance (Avsv), veterinary (Avn), court_rules (KmGer), trade_exam_rules (PruefGewO), health_structure_plans (Spg, ÖSG/RSG), ministerial_decrees (Erlässe), council_minutes (Ministerratsprotokolle) — five of the seven are authentic publications
• Collection-aware filters: issue numbers, issuers (insurance carriers, ministries), cited norm ("decrees citing the DSG"), in-force date for the consolidated collections, plan type and state for health plans, session number and legislature for council minutes
• Binding labels per collection: authentic, administrative_directive (decrees bind the administration, not citizens), or preparatory (council minutes)
• Every record carries the RIS web view — the only browsable surface for the PDF-only council minutes and for ministerial decrees

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ris_lookup_citation _tool

• Parses and routes four citation kinds: norm cites ("§ 6 DSG", "Art 10 B-VG"), gazette numbers across all three federal eras plus LGBl ("BGBl. I Nr. 165/1999", "BGBl. Nr. 194/1961", "RGBl. Nr. 189/1902"), case numbers ("Ro 2026/03/0016", "2025-0.934.677", "14Os49/26a"), and collection numbers ("VfSlg 19.632/2012")
• Routes to deterministic upstream filters (section plus title, per-era number params, Geschäftszahl, Sammlungsnummer) rather than keyword search
• A state gazette number predating that Bundesland's e-Recht switch falls back to its earlier non-authentic series; a VwSlg number cited without its part letter comes back as ambiguous, naming both decisions, rather than resolved to one of them
• Returns found: false with structured guidance instead of throwing when nothing resolves
• court and state hints short-circuit ambiguous formats

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ris_get_document _tool

• Addresses documents by document_number plus application (from any search or lookup result), or by a passed-through ris.bka.gv.at document URL (host and path allowlisted) — including a draft's companion documents from a ris_search_drafts record's materials[].url, which nothing else can reach. format selects the rendition for a companion exactly as for a main document
• format: markdown (default, boilerplate stripped), raw html, RIS xml, or urls_only
• Every response carries a binding status: authentic (with amtssigniert PDF URL), consolidated_informational, historical_record, decision, preparatory, administrative_directive, or translation
• Applications that publish only the signed PDF (district and municipal promulgations, court rules) or only scans (1848–1940 gazettes, ÖNB-hosted) return a format_unavailable notice with the usable URLs instead of failing
• Markdown over 40,000 bytes returns an outline (kind: outline) instead of truncating. Re-call with sections:[…] to pull the entries you need
• Outline entries are the document's §/Artikel/Anlage sections, or — for the court decisions, gazette bodies and announcements that carry no such headings — contiguous byte windows named Part 1 of N … Part N of N, cut at line breaks and covering the text with nothing dropped. Raw html/xml are never sliced and return whole at any size
• Returns content, not fresh metadata. The upstream API has no document-by-number search, so document numbers come from a prior search or lookup result

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ris_track_changes _tool

• application plus changed_from/changed_to returns every document added or changed in the window. A typical two-week federal-law window carries 1,400+ changes
• include_deleted surfaces removals, which no other RIS surface exposes
• The search tools' changed_since interval filters are the coarser alternative

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ris_list_reference _tool

• Returns one static RIS vocabulary table per call — no upstream request, no network dependency
• topic selects the table: applications, courts, states, decision types/kinds, issuing bodies, ministries, collections, stages, changed-since intervals, section types, gazette parts, law types, district authorities, justiz subject areas, search syntax, or citation formats
• The other ris_* tools' recovery hints and zero-hit notices route callers back here by topic

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ris://document/{application}/{documentNumber} _resource

• Markdown only (text/markdown) — the injectable twin of ris_get_document with format: markdown
• Addressed by application + documentNumber, copied verbatim from a search or ris_lookup_citation result
• Applications with no text rendition (district/municipal promulgations, court rules, party-transparency decisions, council minutes, the 1848–1940 imperial gazettes) return a short note pointing at the authentic PDF or scan instead
• Oversized text degrades to the same section/window outline as ris_get_document, but carries no sections selector — re-fetch via the tool to pull a specific one

Features

Built on @cyanheads/mcp-ts-core: stdio and Streamable HTTP transports, pluggable auth (none / jwt / oauth), swappable storage (in-memory, filesystem, Supabase, Cloudflare KV/R2/D1), structured logging with optional OpenTelemetry tracing.

RIS-specific:

• All 39 OGD applications across every controller, from consolidated law and the four levels of authentic gazette to the 17 court and tribunal collections
• Citation engine parses and routes four Austrian citation kinds (norm, gazette number, case number, collection number) to deterministic upstream filters rather than keyword search
• Strict parameter allowlist and JSON-serialized-XML normalizer — RIS silently ignores unknown params, so only live-confirmed spellings are sent upstream; the normalizer handles object-or-array coercion, in-band error detection, six per-controller metadata classes, CELEX reference parsing, and ministry-abbreviation expansion
• Retries with a 1.5s base delay calibrated for RIS's rate-limited API; an HTML response in place of JSON is treated as a throttle/degradation signal
• English tool surface over RIS's German API — Austrian legal terms (Geschäftszahl, Rechtssatz, Bundesgesetzblatt) stay as domain vocabulary and are glossed in the descriptions

Agent-friendly output:

• Discriminated output contracts — every document carries a typed binding status (authentic, historical_record, consolidated_informational, decision, preparatory, administrative_directive, translation) so callers branch on data, not string parsing
• Provenance — responses echo applied filters (e.g. the resolved in_force_as_of date) and, for gazettes, which era tier served the result
• Actionable recovery — typed error reasons (court_filter_mismatch, invalid_query, document_not_found, …) and zero-hit notices each name the concrete next call: a ris_list_reference topic, the right search tool, or ris_lookup_citation
• Response shaping — court- and collection-conditional filter misuse is rejected locally before any upstream call, since RIS silently ignores unknown parameters rather than erroring

Localization

Tool and parameter descriptions are English-only today. German (de-AT) descriptions are planned, pending opt-in localization support in the framework (cyanheads/mcp-ts-core#259); the English surface stays the default and fallback.

Getting started

Public Hosted Instance

A public instance is available at https://ris-austria.caseyjhand.com/mcp — no installation required. Point any MCP client at it via Streamable HTTP:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ris-austria-mcp-server": {
      "type": "streamable-http",
      "url": "https://ris-austria.caseyjhand.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Self-Hosted / Local

Add the server to your MCP client configuration with Bun:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ris-austria-mcp-server": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "bunx",
      "args": ["@cyanheads/ris-austria-mcp-server@latest"]
    }
  }
}

Or with npx (no Bun required):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ris-austria-mcp-server": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@cyanheads/ris-austria-mcp-server@latest"]
    }
  }
}

Or with Docker:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ris-austria-mcp-server": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "docker",
      "args": [
        "run", "-i", "--rm",
        "-e", "MCP_TRANSPORT_TYPE=stdio",
        "ghcr.io/cyanheads/ris-austria-mcp-server:latest"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Add any configuration variables under an "env" key for bunx/npx, or as additional -e NAME=value arguments for Docker.

For Streamable HTTP, set the transport and start the server:

MCP_TRANSPORT_TYPE=http MCP_HTTP_PORT=3010 bun run start:http
# Server listens at http://localhost:3010/mcp

Prerequisites

• Bun v1.3 or higher, or Node.js v24+ (needed for npx/bunx)
• No API key — the RIS OGD API is keyless

Installation

For local development or to run a pinned build:

1. Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/cyanheads/ris-austria-mcp-server.git

2. Navigate into the directory:

cd ris-austria-mcp-server

3. Install dependencies and build:

bun install
bun run rebuild

4. Add to your MCP client configuration file:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ris-austria-mcp-server": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/ris-austria-mcp-server/dist/index.js"],
      "env": {
        "MCP_TRANSPORT_TYPE": "stdio",
        "MCP_LOG_LEVEL": "info"
      }
    }
  }
}

Configuration

Variable	Description	Default
RIS_API_BASE_URL	RIS OGD REST API base URL.	https://data.bka.gv.at/ris/api/v2.6
RIS_CONTENT_BASE_URL	Document content host (also the allowlist host for document_url input).	https://www.ris.bka.gv.at
RIS_CONTACT	Contact string appended to the User-Agent (RIS netiquette asks integrators to be identifiable).	none
MCP_TRANSPORT_TYPE	Transport: stdio or http.	stdio
MCP_HTTP_PORT	HTTP server port.	3010
MCP_SESSION_MODE	HTTP session handling: stateful, stateless, or auto. This server pins stateless serving explicitly.	stateless
MCP_AUTH_MODE	Authentication: none, jwt, or oauth.	none
MCP_LOG_LEVEL	Log level (debug, info, warning, error, …).	info
STORAGE_PROVIDER_TYPE	Storage backend.	in-memory
OTEL_ENABLED	Enable OpenTelemetry instrumentation.	false

See .env.example for the full list of optional overrides.

Running the server

Local development

• Build and run:

  # One-time build
  bun run rebuild
  
  # Run the built server
  bun run start:stdio
  # or
  bun run start:http
  

• Run checks and tests:

  bun run devcheck   # Lint, format, typecheck, security
  bun run test       # Vitest test suite
  bun run lint:mcp   # Validate MCP definitions against spec
  

Docker

docker build -t ris-austria-mcp-server .
docker run --rm -p 3010:3010 ris-austria-mcp-server

The Dockerfile defaults to HTTP transport, stateless session mode, and logs to /var/log/ris-austria-mcp-server. OpenTelemetry peer dependencies are installed by default; build with --build-arg OTEL_ENABLED=false to omit them.

Project structure

Directory	Purpose
src/index.ts	createApp() entry point — registers tools and resources.
src/config	Optional RIS endpoint and contact configuration, parsed with Zod.
src/mcp-server/tools	Tool definitions (*.tool.ts).
src/mcp-server/resources	Resource definitions (*.resource.ts).
src/services/ris	RIS request building, HTTP access, normalization, and static reference data.
docs/design.md	Settled v1 design — tool surface, service spec, live-confirmed RIS API reference.
tests/	Unit and integration tests mirroring src/.
framework-skills/	Development skills synced from @cyanheads/mcp-ts-core.

Development guide

See CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md for development guidelines and architectural rules. The short version:

• Handlers throw, framework catches — no try/catch in tool logic
• Use ctx.log for request-scoped logging, ctx.state for tenant-scoped storage
• Register new tools and resources via createApp() in src/index.ts
• Wrap the RIS API: validate raw → normalize to domain type → return output schema; never fabricate missing fields

Contributing

Issues are welcome. Run checks and tests before submitting:

bun run devcheck
bun run test

License

Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE for details.

RIS OGD data is CC BY 4.0 (attribution: RIS, Bundeskanzleramt Österreich). The underlying legal texts are copyright-free official works. Only the authentic, amtssignierte gazette wording is legally binding — consolidated RIS text is informational.