The reason to reach for this over a one-line shell call is the timezone handling: every tool takes a timezone, so "what date is it in Tokyo right now" and "render this timestamp as the customer in Los Angeles saw it" are single calls rather than arithmetic the model does badly. The comprehensive info tool is the one worth remembering — it returns the parts already split out, so the model does not have to parse a string it just asked for.
A small stdio MCP server that answers time and date questions. Models have no clock, so anything involving "now" — a timestamp for a log line, today's date in another timezone, turning a Unix number from a database into something readable — needs a tool. This covers those four cases and nothing else.
- The current time as ISO, local, UTC or a Unix timestamp, in a named timezone such as `Europe/London` — `get_current_time`
- The current date as ISO, local, short, long, or a custom format built from Intl.DateTimeFormat options — `get_current_date`
- A full picture in one call: ISO, local and UTC strings, the Unix value, and the year, month, day, hour, minute, second, day of week and timezone broken out as fields — `get_datetime_info`
- Any Unix timestamp in milliseconds rendered into ISO, local, UTC or a custom format, in whichever timezone you name — `format_timestamp`
Nothing — no account, no key, no network. Clone the repository, run `npm install`, and point your client at `timeserver.js` by absolute path; on Linux make it executable first. The package is `mcp-time-server` (0.1.0 in package.json) and speaks stdio. The README notes that Claude Desktop may not pick the server up until it is reinstalled.
One command — npx -y mcp-time-server