@cyanheads/cpsc-recalls-mcp-server

Public Hosted Server: https://cpsc-recalls.caseyjhand.com/mcp

Overview

Consumer product recalls from the CPSC saferproducts.gov database — toys, electronics, furniture, appliances, children's products, tools, and clothing. Search recalls by product, brand, retailer, or hazard, fetch full detail for a specific recall number, or pull a recent-recalls feed for a date window.

Tools

Skills

CPSC covers consumer products, including some that sit next to another agency's domain: child-resistant packaging for drugs and supplements, ATVs and snowmobiles, bicycle tires, and gun safes and locks. Food and drugs (FDA), on-road vehicles and their tires (NHTSA), boats (USCG), pesticides (EPA), and firearms (ATF) belong to other agencies; every response carries this jurisdiction note.

Related MCP server: mcp-cpsc

Capability reference

cpsc_search_recalls tool

• At least one criterion, combined with AND: nine text filters of up to 500 characters each (title_search, usually the highest-signal, plus product_name, manufacturer, retailer, importer, distributor, description_search, remedy, hazard_search) and two date axes (date_start/date_end for the issue date, updated_start/updated_end for the last CPSC publish date); limit (1–10,000, default 20; a page holds at most 200) and offset page through total_found

• Each text filter matches every word, in any order, as a case-insensitive substring with no stemming — search a stem (batter finds battery and batteries)

• Returns the issue and last-published dates, hazards, remedy options and instructions, products, UPCs, manufacturer, importer, retailer, and distributor names, images, cpsc_url, and per-recall data_quality_notes; zero matches is an empty success whose effectiveQuery echoes the criteria and whose notice names the criterion to relax. Failures: missing_criteria, invalid_date_range, upstream_rejected (not retryable), upstream_error (retryable)

• has_more is the paging signal; a page cut short by the 64,000-byte response budget, or held to 200 under a larger limit, carries a notice with the offset to continue from

cpsc_get_recall tool

• One recall_number: 5 digits ("25043"), with a letter a–d on some 1998–2001 records ("99003a"); only the record with exactly that number is returned

• Returns the complete record — nullable description (where model numbers usually live), hazards, remedy options and instructions, every product variant, UPCs, injury narrative, company names by role, country of manufacture, images, coordinated-agency recall URLs, and data_quality_notes

• Failures: not_found (resolve a number through cpsc_search_recalls or cpsc_get_recent; for the bare base of a lettered family such as 01160, the hint names the separate lettered recalls 01160a, 01160b, 01160c), upstream_rejected (not retryable), upstream_error (retryable)

cpsc_get_recent tool

• days look-back window (1–365, default 30) anchored to today; limit (1–10,000, default 20; a page holds at most 100) and offset page through total_found, since narrowing days drops the oldest recalls rather than paging. Older recalls are reachable through cpsc_search_recalls date bounds

• Returns a lightweight record per recall — number, date, title, hazards, remedy types, product names, cpsc_url, data_quality_notes — for cpsc_get_recall to expand; has_more is the paging signal, and an empty window, an offset past the end, a budget-cut page, or a page held to 100 under a larger limit carries a notice. Failures: upstream_rejected (not retryable), upstream_error (retryable)

cpsc-recalls-guide skill

• Helps an agent check whether a specific product, model, serial, or UPC was recalled, sweep a brand's or retailer's recall history, monitor new or republished recalls for a hazard, and decide whether a product is CPSC's at all

• Served over MCP as the resource skill://cpsc-recalls-guide/SKILL.md under the template skill://{+path}; also ships in skills/ for plugin installs and the .mcpb bundle

Features

Built on @cyanheads/mcp-ts-core: stdio and Streamable HTTP transports, pluggable auth (none / jwt / oauth), swappable storage (in-memory, filesystem, Supabase, Cloudflare KV/R2/D1), structured logging with optional OpenTelemetry tracing.

CPSC-specific:

• Full client for the CPSC saferproducts.gov public recalls API — search, single-recall detail, and a recent-recalls feed

• Every-word matching on all nine text filters — each word in any order, as a case-insensitive substring with no stemming, against the plain text the results show — applied over the complete result set before paging so total_found and has_more stay accurate; hazard_search (alias hazard) covers hazard text, product names, and remedy instructions

• Handles 5-digit recall numbers and the lettered numbers some 1998–2001 records carry, matching the requested number exactly

• One 50-second budget per call covers every CPSC attempt and retry, so a stalled request ends as a retryable upstream_error before an MCP client's default 60-second timeout

• Jurisdiction boundary documented in every response — names the drug-packaging, vehicle, tire, and gun-safe products CPSC does recall, and the agencies that own the rest

Agent-friendly output:

• Provenance on every response — source_note, cpsc_url, and (CPSC source text) blockquote labels distinguish relayed CPSC narrative from the server's own guidance

• Plain text on both surfaces — the HTML markup and character codes CPSC stores in some records (&, <br>, stray table tags) are converted to plain text before matching and output, and content[] escapes Markdown so model and serial numbers such as 1HFVE05**K4000003 keep every character; recall pages and coordinated recalls render as links, and product images render inline with their captions; HTTP(S) addresses preserve CPSC’s URL values on both surfaces, while other schemes remain visible as text

• Pagination discriminators — total_found, offset, has_more, and truncated on every search/recent response so agents can tell when results are clipped and page with offset; each surface of a page stays within a 64,000-byte budget, and a notice gives the next offset when the budget or the page ceiling ends a page early; an oversized limit is served at the page ceiling rather than rejected

• data_quality_notes on every response — gaps observed in the upstream record (missing hazard text, no product entries), derived from which fields CPSC left blank rather than any judgment call

• Jurisdiction note (cpsc_jurisdiction) on every response — lets agents route callers to the correct agency (FDA, NHTSA, USCG, EPA, ATF) when a product is out of scope

Getting started

Connect to the hosted instance (Streamable HTTP, stateless), no install:

claude mcp add --transport http cpsc-recalls-mcp-server https://cpsc-recalls.caseyjhand.com/mcp

Or run it locally:

claude mcp add cpsc-recalls-mcp-server -- npx -y @cyanheads/cpsc-recalls-mcp-server

For other clients, add this to the MCP config file:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "cpsc-recalls-mcp-server": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@cyanheads/cpsc-recalls-mcp-server"]
    }
  }
}

No API key is required — the CPSC public recalls API is freely accessible. For Docker or a source build, see Running the server.

Configuration

All configuration is validated at startup via Zod schemas. Key environment variables:

No server-specific API keys are required. See .env.example for the full list of optional overrides.

Running the server

Local development

Requires Bun v1.4.0 or higher (or Node.js v24+). No API key is needed.

• Clone and install:

  git clone https://github.com/cyanheads/cpsc-recalls-mcp-server.git
  cd cpsc-recalls-mcp-server && bun install
  cp .env.example .env   # optional — no required API keys

• Build and run the production version:

  # One-time build
  bun run rebuild
  
  # Run the built server
  bun run start:stdio
  # or
  bun run start:http

  For Streamable HTTP, set the transport and port; the server listens at http://localhost:3010/mcp:

  MCP_TRANSPORT_TYPE=http MCP_HTTP_PORT=3010 bun run start:http

• Run checks and tests:

  bun run devcheck  # Lint, format, typecheck, security
  bun run test      # Vitest test suite

Docker

docker build -t cpsc-recalls-mcp-server .
docker run --rm -p 3010:3010 cpsc-recalls-mcp-server

To run the published image over stdio from an MCP client, use "command": "docker" with "args": ["run", "-i", "--rm", "-e", "MCP_TRANSPORT_TYPE=stdio", "ghcr.io/cyanheads/cpsc-recalls-mcp-server:latest"].

The Dockerfile defaults to HTTP transport, stateless session mode, and logs to /var/log/cpsc-recalls-mcp-server. OpenTelemetry peer dependencies are installed by default — build with --build-arg OTEL_ENABLED=false to omit them.

Project structure

Development guide

See CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md for development guidelines and architectural rules. The short version:

• Handlers throw, framework catches — no try/catch in tool logic

• Use ctx.log for request-scoped logging, ctx.state for tenant-scoped storage

• Register new tools in the createApp() arrays in src/index.ts

• Wrap external API calls: validate raw → normalize to domain type → return output schema; never fabricate missing fields

Contributing

Issues are welcome. Run checks and tests before submitting:

bun run devcheck
bun run test

License

Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE for details.