Elastic Book Chat

The book chat app is a conversational book recommendation demo incorporating:

• Azure OpenAI (GPT-4o)
• Elastic with MCP (https://github.com/elastic/mcp-server-elasticsearch?tab=readme-ov-file)
• FastAPI backend
• Vite + React frontend

The app allows users to query a book database in natural language and receive helpful, librarian-style responses powered by real search results.

Features

• Natural language search over books via Elastic MCP
• GPT-4o used for response generation and formatting
• Clear, human-readable summaries of books
• Remembers recent chat history
• Clean, responsive user interface

Tech Stack

Getting Started

Pre-reqs:

• Elasticsearch cluster
• Python 3.11
• Kaggle API key (optional - see below)
• Azure openAI key

Set Up/Data Ingest

1. Clone down the repository and navigate to the mcp-demo folder:

git https://github.com/camillegeorgiou/mcp-demo
cd mcp-demo

2. Set up the Python backend:

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Modify the .env file to include your credentials:

AZURE_OPENAI_API_KEY=your_azure_openai_key
ES_URL=your_elastic_url
ES_API_KEY=elastic_api

4. Navigate to kaggle, spin up an account and download an API key:

• Add the downloaded kaggle.json file to .kaggle

**Alternatiely, you can download the books.csv and modify the script to push the dataset to Elastic.

5. Run the books.py script and confirm data has made it into your cluster:

python books.py

Backend

6. Configure the mcp server in: backend/elasticsearch_mcp.json and establish the connection to your Azure endpoint:

• Modify elasticsearch_mcp to include your ES credentials. The API key should have relevant permissions. See: https://github.com/elastic/mcp-server-elasticsearch?tab=readme-ov-file
• Modify the following to reflect your Azure OpenAI deployment settings in server.py:

llm = AzureChatOpenAI(
        openai_api_version="2025-01-01-preview",
        azure_deployment="gpt-4o",
        azure_endpoint="https://",

7. Start the backend

uvicorn backend.server:app --reload or .venv/bin/uvicorn server:app --reload

• You should see the following output (or similar):

INFO:     Uvicorn running on http://127.0.0.1:8000 (Press CTRL+C to quit)
INFO:     Started reloader process [15448] using StatReload
INFO:     Started server process [15450]
INFO:     Waiting for application startup.
INFO:     Application startup complete.

Frontend

8. In a separate terminal, set up the frontend app:

cd bookchat-frontend 
npm install
npm run dev

• Your bookchat app should be available at http://localhost:5173.

Sample Queries

What are the best books on computing? Which books have the highest rating? Any good biographies for young readers? Which book is the longest?