Public Apis MCP

🚀 Public APIs MCP

A catalog of free public APIs with semantic search capabilities.

The catalog features an extensive list of APIs sourced from the public-apis GitHub repository. A big thank you to all the maintainers, contributors, and API creators! 💯

🚀 Quick Start

To start using the Public APIs MCP, you need to set it up in your MCP clients. For example, in Claude Desktop, you can follow the setup steps below.

✨ Features

• search_public_apis: Conduct embedding-based search across API names and descriptions.
• get_public_api_details: Retrieve full details of an API by its id.
• Resources: public-apis://apis, public-apis://api/{id}

📦 Installation

Setup in Claude Desktop (uv)

Add the following configuration to MCP clients (e.g., Claude Desktop) using uv.

macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "public-apis": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["public-apis-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

💻 Usage Examples

Basic Usage

• Build embeddings index (optional; auto-build on first search):

uvx public-apis-mcp build-index

• Run the MCP server over STDIO:

uvx public-apis-mcp run

📚 Documentation

Tool Reference

search_public_apis

• Purpose: Perform semantic search over the API catalog.
• Parameters: query (str), limit (int, default 5)
• Returns: A list of { id, name, score, snippet }

Example call payload:

{ "name": "search_public_apis", "arguments": { "query": "weather", "limit": 5 } }

get_public_api_details

• Purpose: Fetch full details of an API by its id.
• Parameters: id (str)
• Returns: ApiItem

Example call payload:

{ "name": "get_public_api_details", "arguments": { "id": "a6b3a6b3-a6b3-a6b3-a6b3-a6b3a6b3a6b3" } }

🔧 Technical Details

Development Prerequisites

• Python 3.10+
• uv (https://docs.astral.sh/uv/)

Setup

uv sync --dev

Testing

FREE_APIS_MCP_TEST_MODE=1 uv run pytest -q

Linting and Formatting

uv run ruff check --fix
uv run ruff format

Type Checking

uv run mypy src/

MCP Client Dev Config

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "public-apis-dev": {
      "command": "uv",
      "args": [
        "--directory",
        "<abs_path>/public-apis-mcp",
        "run",
        "public-apis-mcp"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Build and Try

uv build
uv run --with dist/*.whl public-apis-mcp --help

Data & Index

• Data: src/public_apis_mcp/datastore/free_apis.json
• Embedding index: src/public_apis_mcp/datastore/index.npz (auto-built)

Testing with MCP Inspector

For exploring and/or developing this server, you can use the MCP Inspector npm utility:

# Install MCP Inspector
npm install -g @modelcontextprotocol/inspector

# Run local development server with the inspector
npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector uv run public-apis-mcp

# Run PyPI production server with the inspector
npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector uvx public-apis-mcp

📄 License

This project is under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.