arXMCP is a single-maintainer research project. There is no SLA, but issues and questions are welcome and answered best-effort.
| You want to… | Go to |
|---|---|
| Set it up | Install guide |
| Use a feature | Usage guide · MCP tool API |
| Recover from a failure | Operations runbooks · failure-modes.md |
| Report a security issue | SECURITY.md — do not open a public issue |
| Report a bug / ask a question | GitHub issues |
| Propose a change | Contributing guide |
| Symptom | Likely cause & fix |
|---|---|
arxmcp-shim: command not found |
Install didn't put it on $PATH — re-run the install from the install guide. |
Shim returns 503 |
Server is mid-warmup or has no corpus. Wait for /readyz to return 200, or ingest a corpus first. |
Server FATALs naming ARXMCP_CONTACT_EMAIL |
That var is for the arXiv fetch tools, not the server. unset ARXMCP_CONTACT_EMAIL before make up. |
| Container exits at startup | Empty var/arxmcp — the server warms a corpus eagerly. Populate a corpus or set ARXMCP_NOTEBOOK=<slug>. |
Custom client POSTs to /mcp and gets an empty body / 307 |
POST to /mcp/ with the trailing slash. The shim does this for you. |
make eval reports skipped |
The fixture or corpus is missing — see Evaluation. |
The install guide's troubleshooting table has the full matrix. Operational failures (crashes, drift, restore) are covered by the operations runbooks.
Include: what you ran, what you expected, what happened, the relevant log
lines, and your platform (OS, Python version). For server problems, the
output of make status and the last lines of the server log are gold.
Security issues go through SECURITY.md — contact the owner directly and do not file a public issue for an unfixed vulnerability.