mcp-nightscout

What — an MCP server giving an AI assistant read-only access to a Nightscout instance: glucose readings and deterministic, server-side aggregates (mean, median, SD, CV, GMI, time-in-range bands). For — people running their own Nightscout who want to discuss their data with an assistant without handing it write access. Deployed — not deployed, and not published to npm. Runs locally over stdio. Run — npm ci && npm run build && npm run login, then point your MCP client at dist/index.js.

Status

Working, early. Five tools ship, two of them exercised against a real Nightscout instance (v15.0.7) over API v3. 131 tests. Version 0.0.0 — the tool surface is still moving, and nothing is published anywhere.

What is done: the transport, the v3 auth flow, unit resolution, volume caps, secret scrubbing, free-text neutralization, and aggregates whose figures were checked by hand against Nightscout's own Distribution report — mean, median and standard deviation agree to the rounding, and the two remaining gaps are documented conventions rather than unexplained drift (ADR 0004).

What is not: anything touching treatments (see Limits), and publication anywhere.

Related MCP server: nightscout-mcp

Tools

All read-only, all capping their own volume server-side. Roughly 1 000 tokens of tool descriptions per conversation.

Output granularity decides the window cap, so it is a tool rather than a parameter — that is why comparing two periods is a flag on the summary and not a sixth tool (ADR 0006).

Setup

Requires Node 20+.

npm ci
npm run build
npm run login        # stores the token in your OS keychain, input is hidden

npm run login asks for your Nightscout URL and a token. Create the token as a readable subject in Nightscout's Admin Tools — never the admin API_SECRET, which the server refuses at boot.

Then register the server with your MCP client:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "nightscout": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/mcp-nightscout/dist/index.js"],
      "env": { "NIGHTSCOUT_URL": "https://your-nightscout-instance" }
    }
  }
}

The URL is not a secret and travels in plain configuration. The token stays in the keychain — it never needs to appear in a config file, an environment variable, or a command line.

To check the whole chain without an MCP client:

npm run smoke                  # readings hidden, aggregates and shapes shown
npm run smoke -- --date 2026-08-17   # a calendar day, comparable to a Nightscout report
npm run smoke -- --full        # includes real readings; puts health data on screen

Two closed decisions

Neither is up for reopening without a new ADR.

• stdio, local only — no HTTP transport, no listening port. This is not cosmetic: it deletes fail-open auth, tokens in request URLs, non-constant-time comparison, DNS rebinding and missing rate limiting as concerns, structurally rather than by mitigation.

• Read-only — this server will never write to a Nightscout instance. The threat model is treatment alteration, not data leakage: a Nightscout profile holds basal, ISF, ICR and DIA, the parameters a closed loop uses to compute insulin doses. A server able to write those is a server able to change what a pump delivers.

Limits

• treatments and devicestatus are untested. They were empty on the instance used to build this, so no tool reads them yet, no insulin- or carb-dependent figure exists, and the shape of the notes field is unknown.

• Free-text neutralization bounds an injection, it does not prevent one. Third-party-written fields (device today, notes later) are stripped of control characters, truncated, tagged [untrusted:…], and published once per response with readings referencing them by integer index — so a hostile payload appears one time rather than 288. The module deliberately does not try to detect instructions: any pattern list is bypassable, and shipping one would trade a real bound for a false sense of safety. Hostile text still reaches the model, on one line, bounded and labelled (ADR 0005).

• Band percentages are shares of readings, not time-weighted. They coincide only while readings are evenly spaced. Every response carries its own coverage so a figure computed over a sparse window announces itself.

• Thresholds are the fixed international consensus values, not your profile's personal targets — so the numbers stay comparable. If your Nightscout report is configured differently, the figures will differ, and the applied thresholds ship in every response to make that explainable.

Why another one

The existing Nightscout MCP servers are solo projects, most of them exposing write tools, none of them treating the free-text fields of a shared instance as the prompt-injection surface they are. This one is written from scratch against an explicit threat model. It aims for a modest set of read tools and verifiable aggregates — not feature parity with anything.

Documentation

• docs/decisions/ — the structural decisions, with their tradeoffs

• docs/SECURITY.md — threat model, secret handling, incident record

• docs/DATA_MODEL.md — the upstream shapes, probed rather than assumed

• docs/ARCHITECTURE.md — components and the two trust boundaries

License

MIT