notDIRK/fds-mcp

**An MCP server for
FragDenStaat.de, the German freedom-of-information platform
built on froide.**
*Deutsche Fassung*
**Prepare a German freedom-of-information request by asking for it in plain language.**
Your assistant finds the authority that has to answer and proves why it is the right one,
names the act that applies and the deadline it sets, tracks the requests you already sent,
collects the replies and their attachments, and writes a new request to a local file that
you read before anything leaves your machine.
What is MCP, and what does it do here?
MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is the standard that
lets an AI assistant use outside tools — roughly what an extension does for a browser.
fds-mcp is one such tool. Install it once and Claude, or any other MCP client, gains 15
tools that speak to FragDenStaat.de, the German
freedom-of-information platform built on froide.
Four of them need **no account and no token**: searching authorities, reading an act, and
working out who is responsible for a given place all work straight away.
Other froide instances
froide is the Django software underneath FragDenStaat.de, and its own README names a second
production portal: fragdenstaat.at. Point this server at one with
Only https origins without a path or credentials are accepted, and the host allowlist that
keeps the bearer token from following a link to a stranger is derived from this value — so
with .at configured, fragdenstaat.de is a foreign host and is refused.
What that buys you, measured against fragdenstaat.at on 2026-09-05 and kept as live tests:
| | |
|---|---|
| search_authorities, get_authority, get_law | work, with no account |
| check_jurisdiction | **cannot work there** — /api/v1/georegion/ holds 0 rows on .at against 24,216 on .de. Nothing this client can fix |
| the token-bound tools | need an OAuth application registered on that instance |
| the pre-send rule set | encodes **German** FOI law and is not portable. Treat submitting through another instance as unverified |
What it looks like
> **You:** Who has to answer a freedom-of-information request about the city of Bonn, and
> under which act?
>
> **The assistant** calls check_jurisdiction("Bonn"), gets the region chain and
> Kommunalverwaltung Bonn (authority 3495), then get_authority(3495) for the acts that
> apply and their deadlines — and reports the API URLs it used, so you can check the answer
> instead of believing it.
Submitting is possible too, but it is deliberately the hardest thing this server does.
---
⚠️ POST /api/v1/request/ sends immediately and irreversibly
FragDenStaat's REST API has **no draft mode, no preview and no undo**. The moment a
POST /api/v1/request/ succeeds, the e-mail is on its way to the authority, the request
is public (by default) under CC0, and it cannot be recalled.
Worse, MakeRequestSerializer has **no law_type field**. The API therefore always
files under publicbody.default_law, and because froide sorts by ("-meta", "-priority")
that is almost always the *combined meta act* — not the specific act you meant. For a
municipality in Rhineland-Palatinate, asking for the LTranspG (law 16) through the API
silently files under "LTranspG, VIG" (law 18) instead.
**Because of this, the recommended exit of this server is build_submit_url**, which
hands you a prefilled web form with the correct law_type and lets you press send
yourself. submit_request exists, defaults to dry_run=True, and refuses unless five
independent gates all agree — see Safety model.
---
Documentation
- What the API can and cannot do — every limit we hit, how we
measured it, the dead ends we tried, and the mistakes we made along the way
- OAuth setup, with screenshots — registering the application,
scopes, the redirect-URI rules, and what to do when the local HTTPS listener is blocked
- README.de.md and docs/oauth-setup.de.md — the
same documents in German. US English is the source; the German version follows it.
Installation
Or run it without installing anything, straight from PyPI:
From a checkout, for development:
Requires Python 3.10 or newer.
Register it with your MCP client
The server speaks stdio. For Claude Code:
For a client that reads a JSON config:
Or without installing it at all:
The four green tools work immediately, with no account and no token.
---
OAuth setup
The yellow and red tools need an OAuth 2.0 bearer token. FragDenStaat supports exactly
two authentication schemes for its API — OAuth2 and session cookies. There is **no