News API MCP Server

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that provides access to global news articles through the News API. This server implements a standardized interface for searching news articles, retrieving top headlines, and listing available news sources.

Features

• Search for news articles on any topic with advanced filtering options
• Retrieve top headlines by country, category, or source
• Get information about available news sources with filtering by category, language, and country
• Built-in error handling and rate limit management

Installation

Using Claude Desktop

Installing via Docker

• Clone the repository and build a local image to be utilized by your Claude desktop client

cd news-api-mcp
docker build -t mcp/news-api .

• Change your claude_desktop_config.json to match the following, replacing REPLACE_API_KEY with your actual News API key:

claude_desktop_config.json path

• On MacOS: ~/Library/Application\ Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
• On Windows: %APPDATA%/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "newsapi": {
      "command": "docker",
      "args": [
        "run",
        "-i",
        "-e",
        "NEWS_API_KEY",
        "mcp/news-api"
      ],
      "env": {
        "NEWS_API_KEY": "REPLACE_API_KEY"
      }
    }
  }
}

Installing via Smithery

To install News API MCP Server for Claude Desktop automatically via Smithery:

npx -y @smithery/cli install @berlinbra/news-api-mcp --client claude

Development Setup

Install packages

uv install -e .

Running

After connecting Claude client with the MCP tool via json file and installing the packages, Claude should see the server’s mcp tools.

You can run the server yourself via:

uv run src/news_api_mcp/server.py

with inspector:

npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector uv --directory /Users/{INSERT_USER}/YOUR/PATH/TO/news-api-mcp run src/news_api_mcp/server.py

Available Tools

The server implements three tools:

search-news

Search for news articles on any topic.

Input Schema:

{
  "query": {
    "type": "string",
    "description": "Keywords or phrases to search for in the article title and body"
  },
  "from_date": {
    "type": "string",
    "description": "Start date for article search (YYYY-MM-DD format)"
  },
  "to_date": {
    "type": "string",
    "description": "End date for article search (YYYY-MM-DD format)"
  },
  "sources": {
    "type": "string",
    "description": "Comma-separated list of news sources to filter by (e.g., 'bbc-news,cnn')"
  },
  "language": {
    "type": "string",
    "description": "Language of the articles",
    "default": "en"
  },
  "sort_by": {
    "type": "string",
    "description": "Sort articles by relevancy, popularity, or publishedAt",
    "default": "publishedAt"
  },
  "page_size": {
    "type": "integer",