google-contacts-mcp

MCP server for Google Contacts - list, search, and manage contacts.

Use Cases

Email lookup: "See the latest JIRA ticket that's come in. Can we email Sarah from the security team to get their input?" → finds Sarah's email and drafts the message.

Business card capture: After a networking event, snap photos of business cards → your assistant extracts the details and adds them as contacts with a note about where you met.

Find connections: "Who do I know at Google?" or "I'm visiting London next week - who should I catch up with?" → search your personal network.

Call reminder: "Remind me to call Mike at 3pm" → creates a calendar event with Mike's phone number attached so you can dial straight from the reminder.

Contact updates: You receive an out-of-office saying someone left their company with a new personal email → your assistant updates their contact automatically.

(These are just examples - any workflow that needs contact lookup or management can use this.)

Setup

1. Create Google OAuth credentials

1. Go to Google Cloud Console
2. Create a new project (or use existing)
3. Enable the People API
4. Go to APIs & Services → OAuth consent screen, set up consent screen
5. Go to APIs & Services → Credentials → Create Credentials → OAuth client ID
6. Choose Web application
7. Add http://localhost:3000/callback to Authorized redirect URIs
8. Note your Client ID and Client Secret

2. Run the server

GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID='your-client-id' \
GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET='your-client-secret' \
MCP_TRANSPORT=http \
npm start

The server runs on http://localhost:3000 by default. Change with PORT=3001.

3. Add to your MCP client

With the server running, follow the instructions on install-mcp, which generates the right config for your MCP client (Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Cline, VS Code, and more).

Architecture

This server acts as an OAuth proxy to Google:

graph LR
    A[MCP client] <--> B[google-contacts-mcp] <--> C[Google OAuth/API]

1. Server advertises itself as an OAuth authorization server via /.well-known/oauth-authorization-server
2. /register returns the Google OAuth client credentials
3. /authorize redirects to Google, encoding the client's callback URL in state
4. /callback receives the code from Google and forwards to the client's callback
5. /token proxies token requests to Google, injecting client credentials
6. /mcp handles MCP requests, using the bearer token to call People API

The server holds no tokens or state - it just proxies OAuth to Google.

Tools

Tool	Description
contacts_list	List contacts with names, emails, phones, organizations, birthdays, events, URLs, addresses, nicknames, relations, IM usernames, and custom fields
contacts_search	Search contacts by name, email, or phone
directory_search	Search organization directory for coworkers
contact_get	Get detailed info for a single contact
contact_create	Create a new contact
contact_update	Update an existing contact
contact_delete	Permanently delete a contact
contact_photo_update	Set or replace a contact's photo
contact_photo_delete	Remove a contact's photo
contact_groups_list	List contact groups (labels)
contact_group_get	Get a contact group, including its members
contact_group_create	Create a new contact group
contact_group_update	Rename a contact group
contact_group_delete	Permanently delete a contact group
contact_group_members_modify	Add or remove contacts from a contact group

Contributing

Pull requests are welcomed on GitHub! To get started:

1. Install Git and Node.js
2. Clone the repository
3. Install dependencies with npm install
4. Run npm run test to run tests
5. Build with npm run build

Releases

Versions follow the semantic versioning spec.

To release:

1. Use npm version <major | minor | patch> to bump the version
2. Run git push --follow-tags to push with tags
3. Wait for GitHub Actions to publish to the NPM registry.