entra-news-mcp

A searchable knowledge MCP over Entra.news — Merill Fernando's curated weekly digest of Microsoft Entra news, features, and community tools.

What is this?

Entra.news is a high-signal, curated newsletter covering Microsoft Entra (Azure AD) features, announcements, and community tools — published weekly since mid-2023.

This MCP server exposes the full historical archive as a natural language search interface. Ask questions and get sourced answers directly from past issues — including issue number, date, and canonical URL.

Zero per-user infrastructure. Users install an NPX package. That's it.

Quick Start

Claude Desktop

Add to your Claude Desktop config (~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json on macOS, %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json on Windows):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "entra-news-mcp": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["entra-news-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop. The database (~15–20 MB) will be downloaded on first launch and cached in ~/.entra-news-mcp/.

Cursor / Copilot Studio / Any MCP Host

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "entra-news-mcp": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "entra-news-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Semantic Search (Optional)

By default the server uses keyword search (BM25 via FTS5). For significantly better result quality, set your OpenAI API key:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "entra-news-mcp": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["entra-news-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "OPENAI_API_KEY": "sk-..."
      }
    }
  }
}

Local Database Cache

On first launch the server downloads the database (~15–20 MB) from GitHub Releases and caches it locally:

| Platform | Cache location | |----------|---------------| | Windows | %USERPROFILE%\.entra-news-mcp\ | | macOS / Linux | ~/.entra-news-mcp/ |

The server checks for a newer database release once per week. If you want to force an immediate re-download (e.g. after a new issue has been ingested), delete the cache folder and restart your MCP host:

Windows (PowerShell):

Remove-Item "$env:USERPROFILE\.entra-news-mcp" -Recurse -Force

macOS / Linux:

rm -rf ~/.entra-news-mcp

Available MCP Tools

| Tool | Description | |------|-------------| | search_entra_news | Semantic + keyword hybrid search over all issues. Returns sourced excerpts. | | get_issue | Retrieve the full content of a specific issue by number or date. | | list_issues | Browse the archive with optional year/month filtering. | | find_tool_mentions | Discover community tools and GitHub projects mentioned in the archive. |

Example queries

• "What did Entra.news cover about Conditional Access in 2024?"
• "Show me the issue from March 2025"
• "What PowerShell tools for Entra have been mentioned?"
• "Has there been coverage of Verified ID?"
• "List all issues from 2024"

Architecture

Substack API (entra.news/api/v1/posts)
    │
    ▼
Node.js ingestion script  ←  OpenAI text-embedding-3-small
    │
    ▼
SQLite + sqlite-vec (~15–20 MB)
    │
    ▼
GitHub Release asset  ──→  NPX MCP Server
                               └─ Downloads DB on first run
                               └─ Checks for updates weekly
                               └─ Local vector + FTS search

Cost: ~$0.01/week (embeddings on new issues only). Zero hosting.

Running the Ingestion Pipeline

Note: You only need to do this if you're maintaining your own fork or building the initial index. End users just run npx entra-news-mcp — the database is downloaded automatica

... View full README on GitHub