gr-scraper-mcp

MCP server that tracks live board game inventory on thegamerules.com. On each run it scrapes the full catalogue, diffs it against the last stored snapshot, and reports what was added and what was removed. Deployed on Render, backed by Upstash Redis, with a Telegram bot interface.

How it works

1. Puppeteer launches a headless Chromium browser and visits the product listing pages

2. Images, fonts, stylesheets, and tracking scripts are blocked to speed up rendering

3. The scraper waits for .name elements to appear, then collects all game titles

4. The live list is compared against the snapshot stored in Redis

5. Added and removed games are returned, and the snapshot is updated

Related MCP server: telegram-user-mcp

MCP tool

Telegram bot

If TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID is set, the bot also pushes a notification whenever the MCP tool is called from Claude.

Environment variables

Setup

See DEPLOY.md for full step-by-step deployment instructions.

Local development

cp .env.example .env   # fill in your credentials
npm install
npm start              # requires Chromium at /usr/bin/chromium
                       # or set PUPPETEER_EXECUTABLE_PATH

Stack

• Runtime: Node.js 20

• MCP: @modelcontextprotocol/sdk over HTTP (Streamable HTTP transport)

• Browser: Puppeteer Core + system Chromium

• Storage: Upstash Redis

• Bot: node-telegram-bot-api (webhook mode)

• Deployment: Render (Docker, web service)