haystack
Open-source AI orchestration framework for building context-engineered, production-ready LLM applications. Design modular pipelines and agent workflows with explicit control over retrieval, routing, memory, and generation.
Install / Use
claude mcp add deepset-ai -- npx -y github:deepset-ai/haystackIf the server publishes to npm under a different name, use that package instead — check the repo README.
MCP Server
Model Context Protocol server
Quality Score
Category
AutomationSupported Platforms
Our assessment of haystack
haystack scores 97/100 on our quality scale, 134th of 2,863 Automation skills we index (top 5%).
Its MCP Server is 14 KB long, well organised into 12 sections with 2 code examples: a thorough specification that gives an agent plenty to work with.
With 26,929 GitHub stars, it is one of the more widely adopted skills in the catalogue.
Maintenance, license and trust
- The repository was last updated today, so haystack is actively maintained.
- Our last check on 2026-10-20 found the source still online.
- It is released under the Apache-2.0 license, a permissive license that allows use, modification and commercial use with attribution.
- Its trust signals score 100/100, with no cautions. These come from repository metadata, not a code audit — read the skill file before letting an agent act on it.
Safety scan
No issues foundOur scan of the whole file found no instruction hijacking, hidden characters, credential access, data exfiltration or destructive commands. An AI review of the same text found nothing harmful.
AI review by kimi-k2.7-code on 2026-09-24. Automated pattern scan on 2026-09-24. It catches known dangerous patterns, not every risk — read a skill before letting an agent act on it.
haystack compared with similar skills
All 4 of these similar skills score higher than haystack; compare them before choosing.
| Skill | Score | Stars | Updated | Format |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| haystack (this skill)by deepset-ai | 97 | 26.9k | today | MCP Server |
| taste-skillby Leonxlnx | 100 | 110.6k | today | CLAUDE.md |
| Agent-Reachby Panniantong | 100 | 109.2k | today | CLAUDE.md |
| headroomby headroomlabs-ai | 100 | 78.9k | today | CLAUDE.md |
| CowAgentby zhayujie | 100 | 47.8k | today | CLAUDE.md |
Frequently asked questions
- How do I install haystack?
- Run
claude mcp add deepset-ai -- npx -y github:deepset-ai/haystack. The install tabs above show the steps for each supported agent. - Which AI agents does haystack work with?
- It is written for Claude Code and Claude Desktop, as a MCP Server file. Other agents that read the same format can often use it too.
- Is haystack safe to use?
- Our scan of the whole file found no instruction hijacking, hidden characters, credential access, data exfiltration or destructive commands. An AI review of the same text found nothing harmful. It is Apache-2.0-licensed and scores 100/100 on trust signals. Skills are instructions an agent will follow, so read the file before installing it and do not approve commands you do not understand.
- Is haystack still maintained?
- The repository was last updated today, so haystack is actively maintained.
Skill content
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🎉🎊✨ Haystack 3.0 is out! ✨🎊🎉
Read the announcement here!
🥳 🎈 🎆 🪅 🎇 🍾 🥂 🎁 🌈
</div>Haystack is an open-source AI orchestration framework for building production-ready LLM applications in Python.
Design modular pipelines and agent workflows with explicit control over retrieval, routing, memory, and generation. Build scalable RAG systems, multimodal applications, semantic search, question answering, and autonomous agents, all in a transparent architecture that lets you experiment, customize deeply, and deploy with confidence.
Table of Contents
- Installation
- Documentation
- Features
- Haystack Enterprise: Support & Platform
- Telemetry
- 🖖 Community
- Contributing to Haystack
- Organizations using Haystack
Installation
The simplest way to get Haystack is via pip:
pip install haystack-ai
Install nightly pre-releases to try the newest features:
pip install --pre haystack-ai
Haystack supports multiple installation methods, including Docker images. For a comprehensive guide, please refer to the documentation.
Documentation
If you're new to the project, check out "What is Haystack?" then go through the "Get Started Guide" and build your first LLM application in a matter of minutes. Keep learning with the tutorials. For more advanced use cases, or just to get some inspiration, you can browse our Haystack recipes in the Cookbook.
At any given point, hit the documentation to learn more about Haystack, what it can do for you, and the technology behind.
Features
Agents built for production
Extend agent behavior with lifecycle hooks (before_llm, before_tool, on_exit, …) for guardrails and custom logic, and track step_count, token_usage, and tool calls out of the box for monitoring and cost control. Get started fast with ready-made agents from Agent Pack (e.g., a deep research agent, or an advanced RAG agent) or give your own agents progressive skill discovery via SkillToolset, so skill descriptions only enter context when needed.
Built for context engineering
Design flexible systems with explicit control over how information is retrieved, ranked, filtered, combined, structured, and routed before it reaches the model. Define pipelines and agent workflows where retrieval, memory, tools, and generation are transparent and traceable.
Native Async Support
One Pipeline runs synchronously or asynchronously and streams token by token. Agent can run concurrent tool calls.
Modular and customizable
Use built-in components for retrieval, indexing, tool calling, memory, and evaluation, or create your own. Add loops, branches, and conditional logic to precisely control how context moves through your pipelines and agent workflows.
Model- and vendor-agnostic
Integrate with OpenAI, Mistral, Anthropic, Cohere, Hugging Face, Google, Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, local models, and many others. Swap models or infrastructure components without rewriting your system.
Extensible ecosystem
Build and share custom components through a consistent interface that makes it easy for the community and third parties to extend Haystack and contribute to an open ecosystem.
[!TIP]
Would you like to deploy and serve Haystack pipelines as REST APIs or MCP servers? Hayhooks provides a simple way for you to wrap pipelines and agents with custom logic and expose them through HTTP endpoints or MCP. It also supports OpenAI-compatible chat completion endpoints and works with chat UIs like open-webui.
Haystack Enterprise: Support & Platform
Get expert support from the Haystack team, build faster with enterprise-grade templates, and scale securely with deployment guides for cloud and on-prem environments with Haystack Enterprise Starter. Read more about it in the announcement post.
👉 Get Haystack Enterprise Starter
Need a managed production setup for Haystack? The Haystack Enterprise Platform helps you build, test, deploy and operate Haystack pipelines with built-in observability, collaboration, governance, and access controls. It’s available as a managed cloud service or as a self-hosted solution.
👉 Learn more about Haystack Enterprise Platform or try it free
Telemetry
Haystack collects anonymous usage statistics of pipeline components. We receive an event every time these components are initialized. This way, we know which components are most relevant to our community.
Read more about telemetry in Haystack or how you can opt out in Haystack docs.
🖖 Community
If you have a feature request or a bug report, feel free to open an issue in GitHub. We regularly check these, so you can expect a quick response. If you'd like to discuss a topic or get more general advice on how to make Haystack work for your project, you can start a thread in Github Discussions or our Discord channel. We also check 𝕏 (Twitter) and Stack Overflow.
Contributing to Haystack
We are very open to the community's contributions - be it a quick fix of a typo, or a completely new feature! You don't need to be a Haystack expert to provide meaningful improvements. To learn how to get started, check out our Contributor Guidelines first.
There are several ways you can contribute to Haystack:
- Contribute to the main Haystack project
- Contribute an integration on [haystack-core-in
Truncated for display — read the full file on GitHub.
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Trust signals
From repository metadata: license, adoption, age and documentation. Not a code audit — see the Safety scan above for what the skill file itself contains.
