mcp-town-explorer

A learning project that makes every MCP boundary visible: host, client, server, transport, discovery, invocation. The trick that makes the boundaries legible is one server, two hosts: a no-LLM host and an LLM host talk to the exact same server with zero server changes.

What MCP is

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a standard way for an application (the host) to let a language model use external tools and data through a uniform interface. The host embeds an MCP client that speaks JSON-RPC to one or more MCP servers; each server advertises tools (callable functions) and resources (readable content) with machine-readable schemas. The point is decoupling: any MCP-speaking host can use any MCP server without custom glue, because discovery ("what tools exist?") and invocation ("call this tool with these arguments") are standardized.

Related MCP server: Boston Core MCP

Architecture

Which file is which:

• Host: v1_cli/host.py and v2_llm/host.py. The host owns the user interaction, and in V2 owns the LLM and the validation logic.

• Client: ClientSession from the MCP SDK, constructed inside each host. It is not hand-written JSON-RPC; the SDK provides it.

• Server: server/server.py. Built with FastMCP; exposes the tools and resource. Neither host imports it -- they only launch it as a subprocess and speak the protocol.

For a deeper walk-through of the MCP plumbing (transport, client, handshake, schemas, result shapes), see docs/notes.md.

Setup

Uses uv. Python is pinned to 3.12.

uv sync

Run V1 (no LLM, no API key)

Argv selects the tool; the model is never involved. This isolates the protocol from model behavior.

uv run python v1_cli/host.py list-tools            # print the raw advertised JSON schema
uv run python v1_cli/host.py housing Winchester
uv run python v1_cli/host.py distance Winchester
uv run python v1_cli/host.py schools Lexington
uv run python v1_cli/host.py safety Woburn
uv run python v1_cli/host.py resource Winchester   # read the town://{town} resource
uv run python v1_cli/host.py --verbose housing Winchester   # log the protocol lifecycle

The error path, deliberately shown:

uv run python v1_cli/host.py housing Nowhere
# -> ERROR from server: Unknown town: 'Nowhere'. Known towns: ...
# exits non-zero; the server error surfaces across the protocol rather than being swallowed

Run V2 (adds the LLM)

Natural language in. The model sees the tool schemas, proposes a call, the host validates it, the client executes it, the result is fed back, and the model explains. The loop repeats (capped at 5 iterations) until the model stops requesting tools.

Put OPENAI_API_KEY in a .env file at the repo root (it is git-ignored); the host loads it automatically via python-dotenv. Exporting the variable works too.

# .env at the repo root contains: OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...   (loaded automatically)
uv run python v2_llm/host.py "Compare schools in Winchester and Lexington"
uv run python v2_llm/host.py --show-tokens "How safe is Woburn?"   # print tool-schema token cost

# or export it instead of using .env:
export OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...
uv run python v2_llm/host.py "How safe is Woburn?"

The validation step is the reason V2 exists. Before any execution the host checks the proposed tool name against an allowlist and, for tools that take a town, checks that the town exists in the dataset; a rejected call is logged ([REJECTED] ...) and never reaches the server. The exact line where a model proposal becomes an execution is commented in v2_llm/host.py.

Provenance

This dataset describes real Massachusetts towns, but it is stitched together from several sources of differing years and methodologies. It is a demo for teaching MCP architecture. Do not use it for any real decision (buying a home, choosing a school district, judging safety).

Sources, one per column:

Per-column source URLs, vintages, retrieval notes, and known caveats are recorded in PROVENANCE.md. The habit is the lesson: record where every number came from, even in a teaching dataset.

What this does NOT demonstrate

• Deployment. stdio transport means the server is a local subprocess the host spawns. There is no network service, no container, no host/port.

• Auth. No authentication or authorization between host and server. The V2 "permission boundary" is application-level input validation, not identity or access control.

• Remote transport. No HTTP/SSE/streamable transport. Everything is local stdio.

• Multi-user / concurrency. One host, one server subprocess, one user, one request at a time.