Israel Hiking MCP

An unofficial, non-commercial, read-only MCP server exposing Israel Hiking Map / Mapeak hiking data to LLM hosts.

Status: early scaffolding (PR 1 of 9). The server runs and speaks MCP over stdio, but exposes only a placeholder ping tool. Place search, route search, route details, POIs along a route, and routing all land in later PRs.

See LICENSE-NOTICE.md before using any output — the upstream data is CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (non-commercial, share-alike) and ODbL.

Requirements

• Python 3.11+

• uv

Related MCP server: MCP Server - Placeholder Implementation

Setup

uv sync

Run

uv run israel-hiking-mcp

The server communicates over stdio and produces no stdout output of its own — stdout is reserved for the JSON-RPC message stream. Logs go to stderr; set IHM_LOG_LEVEL=DEBUG for verbose output.

Tests

uv run pytest

The suite runs fully offline.

Try it with MCP Inspector

npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector uv run israel-hiking-mcp

Set the working directory to this repository, connect, open the Tools tab, and call ping.

Use from an MCP host

Claude Desktop (claude_desktop_config.json) or any generic MCP client:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "israel-hiking": {
      "command": "uv",
      "args": ["--directory", "/absolute/path/to/israel-hiking-mcp", "run", "israel-hiking-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Tools