McpUPB

An MCP server for UPB Virtual (Moodle) — turn your university LMS into a structured knowledge source an AI assistant can query, sync and reason over.

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"What's due this week?" · "Summarize the latest announcement" · "Build a study plan from this course" · "Sync all my Algorithms material to markdown"

It talks to Moodle's official Web Services REST API (no browser scraping), so it's fast and robust. Although it's tuned for UPB Virtual, it works against any Moodle site with web services enabled — just change MOODLE_BASE_URL.

⚠️ Personal tool. It acts on your account with your token. Respect your institution's terms of service and only access data you're entitled to.

How it works

flowchart LR
    A["🤖 AI Assistant<br/>(Claude, mcpjam…)"] -- MCP / stdio --> B
    subgraph B ["mcp-upb server"]
        T["🛠️ Tools"]
        R["📚 Resources<br/>upb://…"]
        P["💬 Prompts"]
    end
    B --> C["Moodle REST client<br/>(token auth)"]
    C -- "webservice/rest/server.php" --> M[("🎓 UPB Virtual<br/>Moodle")]
    B --> V["🔄 Vault sync"]
    V --> D["🗂️ vault/<br/>markdown + files"]

A typical request flows straight through to the LMS and back as clean JSON:

sequenceDiagram
    participant U as You
    participant AI as AI Assistant
    participant S as mcp-upb
    participant M as Moodle
    U->>AI: "What's due this week?"
    AI->>S: weekly_digest()
    S->>M: core_calendar / forum / messages
    M-->>S: JSON
    S-->>AI: deadlines + announcements + alerts
    AI-->>U: "3 things due, 1 overdue…"

Features

Tools

Tool	Description
whoami	Verify the connection; return the authenticated user + site info
list_courses	All enrolled courses
search_courses	Search the site catalogue
get_course	Sections, activities and downloadable files of a course
list_assignments	Assignments (deadlines + attachments) for one or more courses
get_assignment	Full detail of one assignment
submission_status	Whether an assignment is submitted, plus grade/feedback
get_grades	Grade items and your grades for a course
list_announcements	Latest announcements for a course
latest_announcements	Latest announcements across all courses
notifications	Recent Moodle notifications
upcoming_deadlines	Calendar deadlines across all courses, sorted
weekly_digest	One overview: deadlines + announcements + unread notifications
download_file	Download a Moodle file by its fileurl to ./downloads
pdf_to_markdown	Convert a local PDF to markdown (text layer)
save_markdown	Save markdown into the vault
sync_course	Download all new files of a course into the vault, converting PDFs (incremental)
sync_all	Sync every enrolled course

Resources

Browsable upb:// URIs a client can attach as context:

• upb://courses — enrolled courses
• upb://course/{id} — a course's contents
• upb://course/{id}/assignments — a course's assignments

Prompts

Ready-made commands: weekly_summary, study_plan (arg: course), assignment_checklist (arg: assignment).

Setup

npm install
cp .env.example .env        # Windows: copy .env.example .env
npm run get-token           # enter your UPB username + password

get-token calls login/token.php and prints a MOODLE_TOKEN=... line. Paste it into .env. Your password is never stored — only the token, which lives in .env (gitignored).

If get-token fails with an invalid-login error, your account may use SSO/Google login, which can disable password-based tokens. In that case generate a token manually in Moodle under Preferences → Security keys and paste it into .env.

Environment variables

Variable	Default	Purpose
MOODLE_BASE_URL	https://www.upbvirtual.net/upbvirtual	Moodle site root (no trailing slash)
MOODLE_TOKEN	—	Web-services token (required)
DOWNLOAD_DIR	./downloads	Where download_file saves
VAULT_DIR	./vault	Where synced material is written
CACHE_DIR	./.cache	Incremental-sync metadata

Testing with mcpjam

mcpjam spawns the server as a stdio process and gives you a UI to run tools, browse resources and chat against an LLM.

1. Launch the inspector (opens http://127.0.0.1:6274):

   npm run inspect          # = npx @mcpjam/inspector@latest
   

2. Add Server → STDIO:

   Field	Value
   Transport	STDIO
   Command	npx
   Arguments	tsx src/server.ts
   Working directory	the project root
   Environment	MOODLE_TOKEN=<token> (most reliable; avoids .env/cwd issues)

   For the compiled build: npm run build, then Command node, Arguments dist/server.js.

3. Open Tools and start with whoami. Then list_courses → copy an id → get_course, list_assignments, get_grades, etc.

Use with Claude / other MCP clients

After npm run build, add to your client's MCP config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "upb": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["C:/Users/User/Desktop/GitHub/mcpUPB/dist/server.js"],
      "env": { "MOODLE_TOKEN": "your-token-here" }
    }
  }
}

Scripts

Script	What it does
npm run dev	Run the server with tsx (stdio)
npm run build	Compile to dist/
npm start	Run the compiled server
npm run get-token	Exchange credentials for a token
npm run inspect	Launch mcpjam inspector

Notes & limitations

• pdf_to_markdown / sync_course extract the PDF text layer only (good for slides and notes; no tables/math reconstruction). For high-fidelity conversion, plug in a Docling / PyMuPDF4LLM helper — the rest of the pipeline is unchanged.
• Available data depends on what your Moodle role/capabilities expose via web services; some tools may return errors if a function is disabled site-wide.

Project structure

src/
  server.ts          MCP server entry (stdio)
  config.ts          env config
  tools.ts           tool registrations
  resources.ts       upb:// resources
  prompts.ts         prompt templates
  moodle/
    client.ts        REST transport (token, params, file urls)
    api.ts           typed Moodle function wrappers
  storage/
    cache.ts         incremental-sync cache
  vault/
    sync.ts          sync_course / sync_all
    pdf.ts           pdf -> markdown
    markdown.ts      vault writer
scripts/
  get-token.ts       credentials -> token helper

License

MIT