UNOFFICIAL UCLA Schedule of Classes — MCP Server & Claude Plugin

An MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that lets Claude or any MCP-capable agent query the public UCLA Schedule of Classes — no login or API key required. It wraps the same AJAX endpoints the SoC website itself uses.

The repo is also a Claude Code plugin (ucla-soc) that bundles the server together with a schedule-planning skill: a guided workflow that confirms the term being planned, collects the student's wants and a DARS degree audit, verifies prerequisites and final-exam conflicts, weighs time-of-day/gap/walking-distance preferences, and renders a mock schedule artifact from a fixed template.

Tools

Inputs are forgiving: terms accept 26F or Fall 2026; subjects accept codes or names (COM SCI or Computer Science); catalog numbers accept 31, M151B, cs 31-style input. Ambiguous or unknown inputs return actionable error messages listing valid options.

Schedule planning

Three tools answer the questions that come up once you have a candidate schedule. get_class_detail reads the class detail page behind each section link, so you can check whether two courses share a final exam slot (final_exam is null with a final_exam_note when nothing is scheduled) and whether a class is requisite-blocked. get_course_description reads the General Catalog entry, which states requisites in prose ("Enforced requisites: courses 32, 33, 35L.") independent of any term. estimate_walk_time is fully offline: it strips the room number off a location string, fuzzy-matches the building against a curated dataset (96 buildings, registrar abbreviations included), and reports haversine distance × 1.4 walked at 80 m/min. Coordinates are approximate and labelled as such — it is for spotting a 10-minute passing-period problem, not for navigation. list_buildings shows what it knows.

Degree audit parsing

parse_degree_audit works offline on a file you save yourself: open your audit at dars.ucla.edu (Audit Results tab), use the browser's Save page as (complete webpage or single HTML file), then pass the absolute file path to the tool. Parsing is fully deterministic — it walks the audit's stable DARS markup (.requirement, .subrequirement, .takenCourse, .subreqNeeds, …), no network access and nothing is uploaded. status_filter: "unfulfilled" narrows the output to what's still missing.

Related MCP server: University Course Catalog MCP Server

Setup

Claude Code (plugin — recommended)

The repo is its own plugin marketplace. In Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add aaditsingh07/ucla-soc-mcp
/plugin install ucla-soc@ucla-soc-mcp

No Node build step needed — the plugin ships a self-contained server bundle (dist/bundle.cjs) and registers all tools automatically. Start planning with /ucla-soc:schedule-planning, or just ask about UCLA classes and Claude will pick the skill up on its own.

Manual build (any other setup)

git clone https://github.com/aaditsingh07/ucla-soc-mcp.git
cd ucla-soc-mcp
npm install
npm run build

Note: the repo's .mcp.json is the plugin's server config and uses ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}, so it only resolves when installed as a plugin. For a manual setup, register the server yourself as shown below (Claude Code: claude mcp add ucla-soc -- node /absolute/path/to/dist/index.js).

Claude Desktop

Add to claude_desktop_config.json (Settings → Developer → Edit Config), using the absolute path to dist/index.js in your clone:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ucla-soc": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/ucla-soc-mcp/dist/index.js"]
    }
  }
}

Any other MCP host

Stdio transport: node dist/index.js. All tools are read-only (readOnlyHint: true).

Testing

npm test        # builds, then runs scripts/smoke-test.mjs against the live SoC site

How it works (reverse-engineered endpoints)

This server uses endpoints the web front-end calls:

• Terms — parsed from <option class="select_term"> tags on /ro/public/soc.

• Subject areas — GET /ro/ClassSearch/Public/Search/GetSimpleSearchData?term_cd={term}&search_type=subject; the response embeds an HTML-encoded JSON array of {label, value} pairs.

• Course list — GET /ro/Public/SOC/Results/CourseTitlesView with model (subject search JSON) and filterFlags (availability etc.), paged 25 courses at a time. Each course comes with a model object (including a base64 token) used for the detail call.

• Sections — GET /ro/Public/SOC/Results/GetCourseSummary with a course model. Called with the root model it returns top-level sections (lectures); called with a section's child model it returns that section's discussions/labs. Rows are HTML; status ("Open", "81 of 237 Enrolled", "156 Spots Left", "Class Full (160)"), waitlist ("0 of 40 Taken"), days/time/location/units/instructor are parsed from the column cells.

• Class detail — GET /ro/Public/SOC/Results/ClassDetail?term_cd=&subj_area_cd=&crs_catlg_no=&class_id=&class_no=, the URL each section link points at. The response is the full SoC page shell, with the data in #final_exam_info, #course_requisites, #enrollment_info and #section.

• Catalog descriptions — GET https://catalog.registrar.ucla.edu/course/{year}/{SUBJECTCODE}{NUMBER} (e.g. /course/current/COMSCI111). The catalog's own JSON API needs a key, but the page is server-rendered and every field is in its embedded __NEXT_DATA__ blob.

Requests send X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest. Terms are cached 1 h, subject lists 12 h; course/section data is always fetched live so seat counts are current.

Notes

• search_courses caps at 12 pages (300 courses) per subject and sets a truncated flag if hit.

• get_course_details returns at most 4 matching courses (relevant for topic-split numbers like 188, which appear once per topic).

• get_class_detail fetches one page per section, so it uses the first matching course and caps at 6 sections per call.

• Not every class has a final: online, summer-session and many seminar/lab sections come back as "None listed — consult instructor for method of evaluation". Final exam locations are only published in 9th week; before that the location cell says so.

• Not affiliated with UCLA. Data comes from the public SoC and is subject to change by the registrar; enrollment capacities are "subject to departmental change" per the site.

License

Unlicense — public domain. Do whatever you want with it.