Chat and MCP

Two ways to put your local marola behind something else: the chat server, which answers the public site's chat widget over HTTP (MIP-0033), and the MCP server, which gives an agent marola's tools over stdio. Moved from Run it locally §5.2. Both need that page's §1–3: a marola-app checkout, Ollama serving, and the two models.

Run the chat server

# in a marola-app checkout
just run -- --serve-chat     # port 8787 (a number after the flag picks another); Ctrl+C stops it

It wraps the corpus answer of Ask the ocean notes, with the same emergency footer (MIP-0022). From another terminal, on 2026-10-04 with llama3.2:1b and nomic-embed-text:

curl -s http://localhost:8787/health
# {"status":"ok"}
curl -s -X POST http://localhost:8787/ask -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"question":"what should I do if I get caught in a rip current?"}'
# {"answer":"0. When caught in a rip current, do not fight it.\n1. Stay calm and float to conserve energy. ...",
#  "safety":true,"sources":[{"title":"Rip currents","source":"https://www.weather.gov/safety/ripcurrent"}, ...]}

Every request and response is in the app's CLI reference. Known issues:

• The server listens on every interface, although its start-up line says localhost (marola-dev/marola-app#43), so anything that can reach your machine on that port can use it.
• /ask answers with the strict fallback and a minimum score of 0, whatever MAROLA_ASK_FALLBACK and MAROLA_ASK_MIN_SCORE say (marola-dev/marola-app#42).

Expose it

The widget needs a stable public URL, so use a named Cloudflare Tunnel: a quick tunnel's URL changes on every restart, which would break the widget's saved config. The tunnel is free; it needs a Cloudflare login and, for route dns, a domain whose DNS Cloudflare serves. No port-forwarding on your router.

cloudflared tunnel login                                      # once
cloudflared tunnel create marola-chat
cloudflared tunnel route dns marola-chat chat.<your-domain>
cloudflared tunnel run --url http://localhost:8787 marola-chat

Turn on the widget

The widget is marola-site's code, and so is its configuration: Turning it on. In short, set window.MAROLA_CHAT_ENDPOINT in marola-site's chatbot-config.js to https://chat.<your-domain> and rebuild the site. Empty, the committed default, keeps the widget hidden. With an endpoint, it calls /health on page load, shows its button only on a 200, and says "chatbot offline" when a later request fails.

The trade-off: this narrowly overrides MIP-0005 §9's "no server" decision for the site. The maintainer's own machine becomes a real, if intermittent, origin; uptime is whatever the maintainer's machine and tunnel happen to be, by design (MIP-0033 §6).

Connect an MCP client

The MCP server speaks stdio as marola-swim-conditions and has four tools: find_nearby_beaches, get_swim_recommendation, get_water_quality and ask_ocean_question (arguments and replies in the CLI reference).

• Claude Code, started in the marola-app checkout, finds it in the checkout's .mcp.json as marola.
• Any other client launches it with just against the checkout's justfile; just runs the recipe from the checkout's directory. The client's environment needs just, sbt and a JDK on PATH (the checkout's nix develop shell has them), and the MAROLA_* variables you set in Run it locally §3:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "marola": {
      "command": "just",
      "args": ["--justfile", "/path/to/marola-app/justfile", "mcp-server"],
      "env": { "MAROLA_LOCAL_LLM_MODEL": "llama3.2:1b", "MAROLA_LOCAL_EMBED_MODEL": "nomic-embed-text" }
    }
  }
}

To check it without a client, pipe the handshake in by hand:

# in a marola-app checkout
{ printf '%s\n' \
  '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"initialize","params":{"protocolVersion":"2025-06-18","capabilities":{},"clientInfo":{"name":"check","version":"0"}}}' \
  '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"notifications/initialized"}' \
  '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":2,"method":"tools/call","params":{"name":"find_nearby_beaches","arguments":{"lat":-27.6733,"lon":-48.47}}}'
  sleep 60; } | just mcp-server
# {"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"result":{"protocolVersion":"2025-06-18",...,"serverInfo":{"name":"marola-swim-conditions","version":"0.1.0"},...}}
# {"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":2,"result":{"content":[{"type":"text","text":"[{\"name\":\"Praia do Campeche\",...,\"distance_km\":2.100910064899072},..."}]}}

Known issues: get_swim_recommendation's water_quality is always null; ask get_water_quality for it (marola-dev/marola-app#41). ask_ocean_question ignores MAROLA_ASK_FALLBACK and MAROLA_ASK_MIN_SCORE, as /ask does (marola-dev/marola-app#42).