Star Wars API & MCP server (swapi.build)

SWAPI.build

A free, open-source Star Wars API serving data about People, Films, Planets, Species, Starships, and Vehicles. Built with Quarkus and GraalVM for instant startup, minimal memory footprint, and out-of-the-box performance.

Inspired by the original SWAPI (created by Paul Hallett, maintained by Juriy Bura), this project was born out of the need for a Star Wars API that never goes offline. If you've ever had a live demo break because a third-party API went down, you know why this exists.

Quick Start

Prerequisites: Java 25 and Maven (or use the included Maven Wrapper).

cd swapi-app
./mvnw quarkus:dev

The API and frontend will be available at http://localhost:5432.

API Endpoints

Base path: /api

Ids are the record ids from each entity's url field (for films, 1 = A New Hope). Successful responses return 200; unknown or non-numeric ids return 404.

All responses are JSON. Example:

curl http://localhost:5432/api/people/1

OpenAPI

The full API contract is served at /openapi.json (OpenAPI 3.x, generated from the code — always in sync). The documentation page renders from it, including a "try it" for every endpoint. Generate a client with, e.g.:

npx @openapitools/openapi-generator-cli generate -i https://swapi.build/openapi.json -g typescript-fetch

MCP Server

swapi.build is also a remote MCP server over Streamable HTTP. Any Streamable HTTP client works: the stateless 2026-07-28 revision sends self-contained requests, and earlier revisions negotiate a session through initialize — both are served on the same endpoint. The legacy HTTP+SSE transport (2024-11-05) is not supported. First-party, read-only, no authentication:

https://swapi.build/mcp

Full setup guides: swapi.build/docs/mcp

resource is one of PEOPLE, FILMS, PLANETS, SPECIES, STARSHIPS, VEHICLES. Ids are the record ids from each entity's url field (for FILMS, 1 = A New Hope).

Caching: Quarkiverse MCP Server 2.0.0 emits the required ttlMs: 0 and cacheScope: "public" fields on stateless discovery and tool-list responses. Zero TTL means immediately stale; no positive freshness period is configured. Its cache hints apply to discovery, list methods and resources/read, not tools/call. The Star Wars data here is exposed through tools, so tool-result caching is not enabled, including for sw_random. REST/edge caching is a separate mechanism.

Claude Code

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.