World Port Index MCP server

@pipeworx/world-port-index

Port facilities, depths, anchorages and navigational detail for ~2,950 ports worldwide — lookup by name/UN-LOCODE/WPI number, radius search from a lat/lon point, and listing by country.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1808+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

its WPI number, coordinates, harbor size/type, channel/anchorage/cargo-pier depths, and facility flags (pilotage, tugs, drydock, railway). Refuses with an error if nothing matches; returns a short candidate list if a name matches more than one port.

• portlookup(name | unlocode | wpinumber) — resolve one port and return

radius of a point, nearest first, with distance in km.

• portsnear(latitude, longitude, radiuskm?, limit?) — ports within a

(name or ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code), optionally filtered by harbor size (V=Very small, S=Small, M=Medium, L=Large).

• portsbycountry(country, harbor_size?, limit?) — ports for a country

Auth

Keyless. The pack reads its dataset from a Pipeworx-side store (see "Data sources" below) and makes no outbound calls at request time.

Data sources

Information, World Port Index (Pub. 150) — the standard reference for port facilities, depths, and navigational characteristics worldwide. US federal government data; public domain.

• U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), Maritime Safety

This pack does not bake its data into the gateway bundle — a first version did, and a 1.7MB baked table pushed the gateway's JS bundle over its hard size ceiling, blocking every lane's deploy (fleet #3061, 2026-10-14). Instead it reads a single JSON object out of the shared pipeworx-datasets R2 bucket at request time, cached in Worker-isolate memory for several hours so only a cold isolate pays the fetch. scripts/refresh-ports.mjs fetches NGA's live feed, trims it, and writes that object locally; an operator with R2 write access runs the wrangler r2 object put command it prints to publish it (never run by this script itself). If the R2 object isn't published yet, or the binding isn't configured on a deployment, every tool returns a available: false note rather than throwing or going silently empty. Every real response carries dataasof. Depth fields (channelDepth, anchorageDepth, cargoPierDepth, oilTerminalDepth) are in meters as published by NGA; null means NGA records no data for that category, not zero depth. harborTypeCode and shelterCode are passed through as NGA's own Pub 150 codes rather than decoded, since only the harbor-size code (V/S/M/L) has an unambiguous, well-documented mapping.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "world-port-index": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/world-port-index/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/world-port-index/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — askpipeworx, discovertools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.