googlenews-mcp

MCP server in front of Google News, so agents without external internet access can still read the news: the agent talks only to this server, and this server talks only to news.google.com. It is a news gateway, not a web proxy — there is deliberately no fetch-arbitrary-URL tool.

• Image: ghcr.io/robertdwhite/googlenews-mcp, built by CI in this repo.
• Transport: MCP streamable HTTP at /mcp, bearer-gated by MCP_TOKEN. /healthz is open.
• Upstream: Google News public RSS endpoints (no API key), plus the batchexecute RPC used only to decode article redirect URLs.

Tools

Tool	Does
top_headlines(language, country, count)	Front-page top stories
topic_headlines(topic, ...)	One section: WORLD, NATION, BUSINESS, TECHNOLOGY, ENTERTAINMENT, SCIENCE, SPORTS, HEALTH
search_news(query, when, ...)	Full-text search; supports Google News operators (site:, source:, after:/before:, "...", OR, -) and a when recency window (1h…1m)
geo_headlines(location, ...)	Local news for a city/region/country
decode_urls(urls)	Resolve news.google.com/rss/articles/... redirect links to real publisher URLs (best-effort, max 10/call)

Articles come back as {title, url, published, source, source_url, summary, related}; related carries other outlets' coverage when Google clusters a story.

Config (env)

Var	Meaning
MCP_TOKEN	Bearer token required on /mcp. Unset = unauthenticated (dev only).
PORT	Listen port (default 8080).
GNEWS_LANGUAGE / GNEWS_COUNTRY	Default locale (en / US).
GNEWS_TIMEOUT	Upstream timeout seconds (default 30).

Run locally

pip install -r requirements.txt
python server.py
curl localhost:8080/healthz

Deploy

Manifests live in whitehouse-rke2 under apps/ai/googlenews-mcp (namespace googlenews-mcp, endpoint https://googlenews-mcp.internal.white.fm/mcp, tailnet only).

Notes

• decode_urls uses the same technique as the googlenewsdecoder package; Google changes that endpoint occasionally, so treat it as best-effort. The redirect URLs themselves also work directly in a normal browser.
• Google clusters top-stories items; the per-item related list is parsed out of the RSS description HTML.