Geocoding MCP server

Geocoding MCP Server 🗺️

Turn place names and addresses into coordinates (and back) for Claude Desktop and any MCP-compatible client, powered by OpenStreetMap Nominatim. Forward & reverse geocoding, place/POI search, and distance between locations — all from natural language. No API key required.

npm package: geocode-mcp  ·  GitHub repo: danishashko/geocode-mcp.

🎯 What You Get

• 📍 Geocode — address/place/landmark → latitude & longitude
• 🔄 Reverse geocode — coordinates → human-readable address
• 🔎 Place search — find POIs/places by description
• 📏 Distance — straight-line distance between two named places

Geocoding is something LLMs can't reliably do on their own — this gives Claude real, current coordinates from OpenStreetMap. Every tool returns human-readable markdown by default, or structured JSON on request (response_format: "json"). Lightweight (Python standard library + mcp only), no API key.

🚀 Quick Start

Add this to your Claude Desktop config and restart Claude:

• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claudedesktopconfig.json
• Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claudedesktopconfig.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "geocode": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "geocode-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "GEOCODE_USER_AGENT": "your-app-name your@email.com"
      }
    }
  }
}

OpenStreetMap asks every client to send a descriptive User-Agent with contact info. Set GEOCODEUSERAGENT to your own name/email (a default is provided so it works out of the box). On first launch the npx wrapper creates an isolated Python environment and installs the dependency (one-time, ~a minute). You need Python 3.10+ and Node.js 16+.

Prefer a global install?

npm install -g geocode-mcp

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "geocode": {
      "command": "geocode-mcp",
      "env": { "GEOCODE_USER_AGENT": "your-app-name your@email.com" }
    }
  }
}

🔧 Available Tools

Every tool also accepts responseformat ("markdown", the default, or "json"). countrycodes is an optional comma-separated ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 filter (e.g. us or us,ca).

💬 Example Prompts

Once the server is connected, just ask Claude:

• "What are the coordinates of the Eiffel Tower?"
• "What's at latitude 40.7484, longitude -73.9857?"
• "Find bookstores in Paris."
• "How far is it from London to Edinburgh in miles?"
• "Geocode '1600 Pennsylvania Avenue' — US only."

🐛 Troubleshooting

"OpenStreetMap is rate-limiting requests" Nominatim's public server allows ~1 request/second. This server self-throttles, but if you still hit it, wait a moment.

"No locations found" Try a more specific or differently-worded query, or add a country_codes filter to disambiguate.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.