google-maps-places-mcp

MCP server for Google Maps Places API - search for places and get photos.

Use Cases

Meeting coordination: Someone emails "Let's meet at Nando's near the office - what time works best for you?" → your AI assistant looks up the location, checks opening hours, and adds it to your calendar with the address.

Local recommendations: Ask "find a quiet café with WiFi near King's Cross for a 2-hour work session" → get places with ratings, hours, and photos to help you decide.

Address validation: Confirm or autocomplete partial addresses before sending mail or booking deliveries.

(These are just examples - any workflow that needs place search or business info can use this.)

Setup

1. Create Google OAuth credentials

1. Go to Google Cloud Console
2. Create a new project (or use existing)
3. Enable the Places API (New)
4. Go to APIs & Services → OAuth consent screen, set up consent screen
5. Go to APIs & Services → Credentials → Create Credentials → OAuth client ID
6. Choose Web application
7. Add http://localhost:3000/callback to Authorized redirect URIs
8. Note your Client ID and Client Secret

2. Run the server

GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID='your-client-id' \
GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET='your-client-secret' \
MCP_TRANSPORT=http \
npm start

The server runs on http://localhost:3000 by default. Change with PORT=3001.

3. Add to your MCP client

With the server running, follow the instructions on install-mcp, which generates the right config for your MCP client (Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Cline, VS Code, and more).

Architecture

This server acts as an OAuth proxy to Google:

graph LR
    A[MCP client] <--> B[google-maps-places-mcp] <--> C[Google OAuth/API]

1. Server advertises itself as an OAuth authorization server via /.well-known/oauth-authorization-server
2. /register returns the Google OAuth client credentials
3. /authorize redirects to Google, encoding the client's callback URL in state
4. /callback receives the code from Google and forwards to the client's callback
5. /token proxies token requests to Google, injecting client credentials
6. /mcp handles MCP requests, using the bearer token to call Places API

The server holds no tokens or state - it just proxies OAuth to Google.

Tools

Tool	Description
places_text_search	Search for places by text query (e.g., "coffee shops near me")
places_photo_get	Get a photo URL for a place

OAuth Scope

• cloud-platform - Access to Google Cloud APIs (required for Places API New)

Contributing

Pull requests are welcomed on GitHub! To get started:

1. Install Git and Node.js
2. Clone the repository
3. Install dependencies with npm install
4. Run npm run test to run tests
5. Build with npm run build

Releases

Versions follow the semantic versioning spec.

To release:

1. Use npm version <major | minor | patch> to bump the version
2. Run git push --follow-tags to push with tags
3. Wait for GitHub Actions to publish to the NPM registry.