Pickuppatrol MCP server

pickuppatrol-mcp

An MCP server for PickUp Patrol — the school dismissal app. Read and change how your children leave school: their weekly default plan, one-off changes for specific dates, and the school's dismissal options and cutoff times.

Developed and maintained by AI (Claude Code). Use at your own discretion.

What it talks to

app.pickuppatrol.net runs a ServiceStack JSON API behind an Ionic/Vue SPA. There is no published API, but the service is reachable server-side with an ordinary HTTPS request — no browser extension, no bot wall, no captcha. The server signs in with your own email and password and holds the resulting session in memory.

Every request shape is captured in docs/PICKUPPATROL-API.md, read off the shipped client rather than guessed, and exercised against a real account — reads, a write, and its restore.

Install

// .mcp.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pickuppatrol": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@chrischall/pickuppatrol-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "PICKUPPATROL_USERNAME": "you@example.com",
        "PICKUPPATROL_PASSWORD": "…"
      }
    }
  }
}

For local development, copy .env.example to .env and fill it in.

The server starts without credentials — it answers the host's install-time probe and only reports the configuration error on the first tool call.

Tools

Reads

Writes — every one requires confirm: true. Without it the tool makes no change and returns a dry-run of the exact payload it would send.

Two things the tools do that the API does not

Rules are enforced before anything is sent. Each dismissal option carries its own requirements — a note, a car number, an early-dismissal time, or a restriction to particular students. pupsetplan checks them against the school's own list and refuses with the school's wording, so a rejected write is a validation message rather than an opaque 400.

Writes are verified by re-reading. A 2xx from PickUp Patrol is not proof: a change made after the school's cutoff is accepted and silently ignored. Every write re-reads the affected dates and compares the transportation id and the note — never ModifiedDate, which advances on its own and would make every write look successful. The note is part of the proof because every dismissal option seen so far requires one, which makes a note-only edit ordinary: an id-only comparison would report success from a field that never had to move. The result says verified: true/false, and names the dates that did not move.

Without the MCP server

skills/pickuppatrol-api/ is a shell-out skill covering the same API with curl and jq, for scripts or a machine where the server is not installed.

Development

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.