news-mcp MCP server

mcp news server

IMPORTANT

• Do not begin coding unless the user asks you to. If the user is asking a question about the code, answer the question - do not write or modify code unless explicitly asked.

Components

Resources

The server exposes news articles stored in a database via a resource URI:

• news://{category}/{limit}: Retrieves a list of the latest articles for a given category.
  • {category}: Filters articles by category (e.g., tech, data_science, news). See tool description for full list.
  • {limit} (optional, default 10): Specifies the maximum number of articles to return.
• Each returned article includes title, link, published date, and source.

Prompts

The server currently does not expose any prompts. (The summarization logic exists internally but is not available via an MCP prompt).

Tools

The server implements one tool:

• summarize_news: Retrieves raw news articles from the database, allowing the client (LLM) to summarize them.
  • Takes optional category (string) and limit (integer, default 20) arguments.
  • Returns a list of article dictionaries, each containing id, title, link, published, source, and content.
  • Available categories: tech, data_science, llm_tools, cybersecurity, linux, audio_dsp, startups, news, science, research, policy.

Development

Building and Publishing

To prepare the package for distribution:

1. Sync dependencies and update lockfile:

uv sync

2. Build package distributions:

uv build

This will create source and wheel distributions in the dist/ directory.

3. Publish to PyPI:

uv publish

Note: You'll need to set PyPI credentials via environment variables or command flags:

• Token: --token or UV_PUBLISH_TOKEN
• Or username/password: --username/UV_PUBLISH_USERNAME and --password/UV_PUBLISH_PASSWORD

Debugging

Since MCP servers run over stdio, debugging can be challenging. For the best debugging experience, we strongly recommend using the MCP Inspector.

You can launch the MCP Inspector via npm with this command:

npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector uv --directory ~/dev/news-mcp run news-mcp 

Upon launching, the Inspector will display a URL that you can access in your browser to begin debugging.

Configuration

The server relies on a PostgreSQL database configured via the DATABASE_URL environment variable (defaults to postgresql://localhost/mcp_news).

The news_gatherer.py script (intended to be run separately/scheduled) populates the database from various RSS feeds.

Summarization logic (internal, not exposed via MCP) uses the OpenAI API, configured via the OPENAI_API_KEY environment variable.

Other configurations (via environment variables or defaults):

• LOOKBACK_HOURS: How far back news_gatherer.py looks for new articles (default: 6).
• SUMMARY_WORD_TARGET: Target word count for internal summarization (default: 500).
• MAX_ARTICLES_PER_SUMMARY: Maximum articles included in one summary batch (default: 25).
• KEYWORD_FILTER: Keywords used by internal summarization logic.

Quickstart

Install

Claude Desktop

On MacOS: ~/Library/Application\ Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json On Windows: %APPDATA%/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json