google-maps-places-mcp

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

• Go to Google Cloud Console
• Create a new project (or use existing)
• Enable the Places API (New)
• Go to APIs & Services → OAuth consent screen, set up consent screen
• Go to APIs & Services → Credentials → Create Credentials → OAuth client ID
• Choose Web application
• Add http://localhost:3000/callback to Authorized redirect URIs
• 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

claude mcp add --transport http google-maps-places-mcp http://localhost:3000/mcp

Architecture

This server acts as an OAuth proxy to Google:

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

• Server advertises itself as an OAuth authorization server via /.well-known/oauth-authorization-server
• /register returns the Google OAuth client credentials
• /authorize redirects to Google, encoding the client's callback URL in state
• /callback receives the code from Google and forwards to the client's callback
• /token proxies token requests to Google, injecting client credentials
• /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:

• Install Git and Node.js
• Clone the repository
• Install dependencies with npm install
• Run npm run test to run tests
• Build with npm run build

Releases

Versions follow the semantic versioning spec.

To release:

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