Public APIs Catalogue

An MCP server that indexes the public-apis catalogue and lets an LLM query it by category, auth type, HTTPS support, CORS, and keyword — without browsing the README manually.

Why

Without this MCP, an LLM recommending a public API has to guess or ask the user to check manually. With it, the LLM can say:

"I need a Books API, HTTPS, no auth, CORS-enabled for your React app." → query_apis(category="Books", no_auth=True, https=True, cors="yes")

Tools

Tool	Description
list_categories	Returns all available API categories (Animals, Finance, …)
query_apis	Filters the index by keyword, category, auth, HTTPS, CORS
update_index	Re-downloads the README and rebuilds the index

query_apis parameters

Parameter	Type	Description
keyword	str	Substring match on name or description
category	str	Exact category (case-insensitive)
auth	str	"apiKey", "OAuth", "" (none), etc.
no_auth	bool	Shortcut: APIs that need no authentication
https	bool	True = HTTPS only, False = HTTP only
cors	str	"yes", "no", "unknown"

Installation

cd MCP_PUBLIC_APIS
pip install -e .

Running

mcp-public-apis

Or add it to your MCP client config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "public-apis": {
      "command": "mcp-public-apis"
    }
  }
}

Development

pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest

Data Source

The index is built from the raw README.md of public-apis/public-apis on GitHub, which lists ~1400 public APIs organised into ~80 categories. The schema mirrors the README table exactly:

name · url · description · auth · https · cors · category