chowdown MCP server

🍳 chowdown

A recipe app for Cooklang .cook files, kept in the person's own Google Drive. Built as a Next.js app on Cloudflare Workers (OpenNext).

The Cloudflare Worker does the real work: Google sign-in, a separate "Connect Google Drive" step, syncing the Recipes folder into a D1 cache, the REST API, the MCP server (with its OAuth 2.1 endpoints) and the model calls for tagging and "find similar" (Workers AI). Drive stays the source of truth; D1 is a cache so pages render in one round trip.

Stack

• Next.js 16 (App Router), React 19 and Tailwind 4, on Cloudflare Workers via OpenNext (@opennextjs/cloudflare)
• D1 with Drizzle, plus the Workers AI and Images bindings
• devbox pins Node 24
• Jest for unit tests, Cypress for end-to-end tests
• @mridang/eslint-defaults for linting
• @cooklang/cooklang-ts for parsing

Google setup

Signing in and connecting Google Drive are two separate steps, each with its own Google consent screen:

account and a signed session cookie, and nothing else.

1. Sign in asks for identity only (openid email profile). It creates the

pages that need it; GET /auth/drive) adds the drive.file scope and an offline refresh token, then creates the app-managed "Recipes" folder. drive.file is non-sensitive and only reaches files chowdown created, so there is no Google verification and nothing is published to the Marketplace.

1. Connect Google Drive (the button in the header, the account menu, and on

Until Drive is connected a person can look around and see anything already cached, but anything that reads or writes their Drive files is refused (the REST API answers 409 /problems/drive-not-connected, MCP tools return an error result that says what to do).

Set up in Google Cloud:

your Gmail as a test user (or publish to production — still review-free).

1. Enable the Google Drive API.
2. OAuth consent screen: External, add the .../auth/drive.file scope, add

1. OAuth client ID (Web application) → Authorized redirect URIs:

• http://localhost:3737/auth/callback (dev)
• https://chowdown.apps.mrida.ng/auth/callback (prod)

Secrets, in .env locally and wrangler secret put in production (see Deploy):

GOOGLE_OAUTH_CLIENT_ID=....apps.googleusercontent.com
GOOGLE_OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRET=...
SESSION_SECRET=...          # openssl rand -base64 32 — signs the session cookie
TOKEN_ENCRYPTION_KEY=...    # openssl rand -base64 32 — seals Drive refresh tokens

APP_URL is optional (the public origin, if it can't be read from the request).

Connecting an assistant (MCP)

chowdown is an MCP server at https:///mcp, protected with OAuth 2.1 as the MCP authorization spec describes. Add that URL as a connector in ChatGPT, Claude or any MCP client, sign in with Google when asked, and approve. There is no secret to copy. The person needs to have connected Google Drive (see above); until then the assistant is told so instead of being shown an empty collection.

chowdown is listed in the MCP Registry as io.github.mridang/chowdown; the listing is server.json in this repository.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.