Illinois Code MCP Server

Illinois Compiled Statutes by citation, plus topic search

Keyless. 720 ILCS 5/9-1 is first degree murder.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1865+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

The encoding is derivable

720 ILCS 5/9-1  ->  ?DocName=072000050K9-1
                             ^^^^chapter ^^^^act 0 K+section

Chapter and act zero-padded to four. The site navigates by internal ChapterID and ActID, but none of that is needed — the citation carries everything.

Why the live path was rejected twice first

Earlier probes used the OLD path (fulltext.asp, now 404 after a site restructure) and a needle that does not appear in the statute. Two independent mistakes producing the same "no", which read as "Illinois is unreachable" rather than "you asked wrong".

Coverage (fleet #2505)

The live site's FullText endpoint is unreachable from a Cloudflare Worker for a different, unfixable reason: ilga.gov serves an incomplete TLS certificate chain (its own leaf certificate with no intermediate). curl on a machine whose OS trust store already has the missing Sectigo intermediate succeeds; fetch() — Cloudflare's or plain Node's, both strict — fails outright (HTTP 526 at the gateway; fetch failed from Node directly). No retry fixes a certificate chain, which is why illinois-code read upstream_down every day for 14 straight days before this shipped.

ILGA's own "Access Denied" page for automated traffic to ilga.gov names the fix: a public, nightly-synced file repository at ftp.ilga.gov explicitly meant for bulk/automated consumption ("Automated systems should retrieve files from the repository rather than scraping ILGA.gov"). scripts/ingest-il-statutes.mjs walks it — outside Workers, where curl still works — and writes one JSON bundle per CHAPTER (68 objects, not 72,000 — one per act or per section would cost the same per-write and there is no reason to pay for it) into the shared pipeworx-datasets R2 bucket at statutes/il/<chapter>.json.

il_compiled_statute tries the local bundle first. If the chapter/act has been crawled and the section simply is not in it, that is authoritative — no point retrying a live path that currently fails for every citation regardless of validity — and the tool says section_not_found directly. If the chapter/act has not been crawled at all, it falls back to the live fetch.

data_as_of on every response says whether it came from the pre-fetched text (the crawl's ingested_at) or a live fetch (now).

Topic search

il_statute_search answers questions no citation lookup can — "currency exchange license fee", "concealed carry reciprocity" — via FTS5 in the shared SEARCH_SHARD Durable Object (workers/gateway/src/search-shard.ts, shard name il-statutes; reused, not a new Cloudflare binding — the gateway sits at its text-binding ceiling). The FTS body is the section's heading + full text, not just the heading: the DO's contentless design exists to avoid duplicating opinion text at case-law's 46 GB scale, which does not apply at this corpus's size, and a topic query's words are far more often in a section's body than in its short heading. Hit ids resolve back to citations via statutes/il/_index.json. Search hits carry a citation and heading; call il_compiled_statute with the chapter/act/section from a result for the full text.

Miss behaviour

Live fallback: 200 with no Sec. heading — detected structurally, unchanged from the original pack. Pre-fetched: the chapter/act bundle exists but the section is not in its sections array.

Refresh

node scripts/ingest-il-statutes.mjs — re-run periodically (Illinois's legislative session runs annually; there is no daily-freshness need here). No schedule is wired up: dispatch it by hand, or via gh workflow run if/when a workflow is added — GitHub's own schedule: trigger has been unreliable since ~2026-09-09 (see CLAUDE.md), so a recurring refresh should follow the monitor-dispatch pattern rather than a bare cron trigger.

Data source

Illinois General Assembly (ftp.ilga.gov public file repository, and ilga.gov for the live fallback). Illinois statutes are public record; no reuse restriction was found on the bulk file repository.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "illinois-code": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/illinois-code/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/illinois-code/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1865+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/il_compiled_statute \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"chapter":"720","act":"5","section":"9-1"}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/il_compiled_statute. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Run it from npm

@pipeworx/mcp-illinois-code is a local stdio bridge to the Pipeworx gateway: your MCP client starts it with npx, and it forwards every call to the same https://gateway.pipeworx.io/illinois-code/mcp endpoint shown above. It needs network access; there is no offline mode.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "illinois-code": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-illinois-code"]
    }
  }
}

Without a key it calls anonymously, capped at 50 calls a day. A free account raises that to 200 a day: get a key at https://pipeworx.io/signup and add "env": { "PIPEWORX_API_KEY": "<your key>" } to the server entry. The key is sent as a Bearer token, the same way a hosted connection sends it, so calls are metered and billed exactly as they are there.

It lists only this pack's tools by default. Set PIPEWORX_META_TOOLS=1 to also list ask_pipeworx and the other gateway-wide tools.

Behind an HTTPS proxy: Node's built-in fetch does not read HTTPS_PROXY by default. Newer Node releases honour it when NODE_USE_ENV_PROXY=1 is set; check your Node version's documentation.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Illinois Code data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT