mcp-rona

A Model Context Protocol server for RONA (rona.ca). It exposes RONA's catalogue — product search, product detail, online availability and a store finder — to MCP clients such as Claude and Cursor.

Unofficial. This project is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by RONA inc. It reads publicly available endpoints of rona.ca for personal, noncommercial use. Respect RONA's terms of service and use responsibly.

Tools

rona_search

rona_product

rona_store_availability

rona_stores

The store locator geosorts by coordinates only, so a postal code is first geocoded via api.zippopotam.us (free, no key). Distance is reported by RONA's API, with a local haversine fallback.

Related MCP server: SlimWeb Client MCP

A note on prices and store stock

RONA does not expose unit prices or real-time per-store stock (quantities, aisle/bay) through its public APIs:

• Prices are guest-gated (the price endpoint returns no value without a session).

• Real-time per-store inventory sits behind a DataDome JavaScript challenge that a headless client cannot solve.

So price is reported as null, and availability is limited to online purchasability (Available / Unavailable). Search, product detail and the store finder are fully functional.

How it talks to RONA

rona.ca is behind Cloudflare, which gates requests on both the HTTP version and the client's TLS (JA3) fingerprint. Node's native HTTP stack (fetch/undici) gets 403; only curl --http2 is allowlisted, so every request shells out to curl. No cookies are required for the public endpoints used here.

Requirement: curl with HTTP/2 support must be on PATH (standard on macOS and most Linux distros).

Build & run

npm install
npm run build
npm start          # runs the MCP server on stdio

Quick smoke test of the search layer:

node --input-type=module -e 'import {search} from "./dist/search.js"; console.log(await search({query:"drill", pageSize:3}))'

Inspect with the MCP Inspector:

npm run inspect

Connecting a client

Add to your MCP client config (e.g. Claude Desktop claude_desktop_config.json), pointing at the built entrypoint:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "rona": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/mcp_rona/dist/index.js"]
    }
  }
}

Project layout

src/
  index.ts    MCP server + tool registration (stdio)
  rona.ts     curl --http2 transport for rona.ca + Constructor.io
  search.ts   rona_search (Constructor.io search + category-redirect fallback)
  product.ts  rona_product + rona_store_availability (catalogue + WCS availability)
  stores.ts   rona_stores (postal-code geocode → store locator)

License

PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0 — free to use, modify and share for noncommercial purposes. Commercial use requires a separate license from the author.