README.md

metadata

title: CanLex Web
sdk: docker
app_port: 7860
pinned: false

CanLex Web (Path B)

A private web front-end for CanLex, so people without an MCP-capable AI client can still ask Canadian legal-research questions.

How it works -- thin client

This app holds no copy of the legal corpus. For each question it:

1. calls the deployed CanLex MCP server (canlex_search_legislation) to retrieve the cited source passages;
2. sends those passages and the question to Google Gemini Flash, which composes a grounded, cited answer following CanLex's own answering instructions;
3. displays the answer, with the retrieved passages shown for review.

Because retrieval stays on the MCP server, a corpus or retrieval change is deployed once (to the MCP Space) and both the MCP connector and this website pick it up. Only UI or prompt changes redeploy this Space.

Required Space secrets

Set these under Settings -> Variables and secrets:

Name	Kind	Purpose
GEMINI_API_KEY	secret	Free Gemini key from Google AI Studio (https://aistudio.google.com/apikey).
CANLEX_WEB_AUTH	secret	Login credentials, one username:password per line.

Optional overrides:

Name	Default
CANLEX_MCP_URL	https://beemer0-canlex.hf.space/mcp
CANLEX_GEMINI_MODEL	gemini-2.5-flash

If CANLEX_WEB_AUTH is unset the app falls back to an insecure default login (canlex / canlex) and logs a warning -- set the secret before real use.

Make the Space private

Under Settings -> Change Space visibility, set the Space to Private. The app then has two layers of protection: Hugging Face gates who can open the page at all, and Gradio's username/password gates who can use it.

Run locally

pip install -r requirements.txt
# PowerShell:
$env:GEMINI_API_KEY = "your-key"
$env:CANLEX_WEB_AUTH = "me:secret"
python app.py

Then open http://localhost:7860.