Swift Netnewswire

CI Swift 6.2 macOS 26+ License: MIT Built with Claude Code

A read-only Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for NetNewsWire, the open-source RSS reader for Mac.

Gives AI assistants like Claude access to your NetNewsWire feeds, articles, and search index.

Tools

Tool	Description
list_accounts	List available NNW accounts (OnMyMac, iCloud, etc.)
list_feeds	List subscribed feeds (parsed from OPML)
list_starred_articles	Starred articles with optional feed filter and limit
list_recent_articles	Recent articles by arrival date
get_article	Full article content by ID; optional format (html/text) and max_content_length to bound the body
search_articles	Full-text search using NNW's FTS4 index
get_article_count	Total, starred, and unread counts

All tools are read-only. Nothing is modified. Each tool returns machine-readable structuredContent (with a declared outputSchema) alongside the human-readable markdown.

Requirements

• macOS 26+
• Swift 6.2+ (builds on the Swift 6.3 toolchain in Xcode 26)
• NetNewsWire (Mac App Store or direct download); tested against 7.1.1

Build

swift build -c release

The binary will be at .build/release/netnewswire-mcp.

Configure

Add to your Claude Code MCP config (~/.claude/claude_desktop_config.json or similar):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "netnewswire": {
      "command": "/path/to/netnewswire-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Or, with the Claude Code CLI:

claude mcp add netnewswire /path/to/.build/release/netnewswire-mcp

Full Disk Access

NetNewsWire keeps its databases inside a macOS app container, which the system protects with privacy controls (TCC). The server can only read it if the process that launches it has Full Disk Access — otherwise it exits at startup with Operation not permitted.

Grant FDA to whichever app hosts your MCP client, then restart that app:

• Running Claude Code from a terminal → System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access → enable Terminal (or iTerm).
• Another host (VS Code, the Claude desktop app) → grant FDA to that app instead.

How it works

The server reads NetNewsWire's SQLite databases directly (read-only mode) from:

~/Library/Containers/com.ranchero.NetNewsWire-Evergreen/Data/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/Accounts/

It auto-discovers all accounts and their databases on startup. Feed lists are parsed from each account's Subscriptions.opml file. Full-text search uses NNW's built-in FTS4 search index.

Dependencies

• swift-sdk 0.12.1+ - MCP protocol implementation for Swift
• GRDB.swift 7.x - SQLite toolkit for Swift

Notes

• Only tested with Claude Code. It should work with any MCP client, but your mileage may vary.
• This depends on NetNewsWire's internal database schema, which is not a public API and could change between versions. NetNewsWire 7.1 moved authors into an inline JSON column on articles (the old authors/authorsLookup tables are gone); this server reads the current layout.
• Feed IDs are the XML URLs of the feeds, not UUIDs.
• Dates are Unix timestamps (seconds since 1970).

License

MIT