pickuppatrol-mcp

An MCP server for PickUp Patrol — the school dismissal app. Read and change how your children leave school: their weekly default plan, one-off changes for specific dates, and the school's dismissal options and cutoff times.

Developed and maintained by AI (Claude Code). Use at your own discretion.

What it talks to

app.pickuppatrol.net runs a ServiceStack JSON API behind an Ionic/Vue SPA. There is no published API, but the service is reachable server-side with an ordinary HTTPS request — no browser extension, no bot wall, no captcha. The server signs in with your own email and password and holds the resulting session in memory.

Every request shape is captured in docs/PICKUPPATROL-API.md, read off the shipped client rather than guessed, and exercised against a real account — reads, a write, and its restore.

Install

// .mcp.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pickuppatrol": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@chrischall/pickuppatrol-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "PICKUPPATROL_USERNAME": "you@example.com",
        "PICKUPPATROL_PASSWORD": "…"
      }
    }
  }
}

For local development, copy .env.example to .env and fill it in.

The server starts without credentials — it answers the host's install-time probe and only reports the configuration error on the first tool call.

Tools

Reads

Reads are projected to known fields. Plan notes can be written by any guardian on the account, and option hints and school settings by school staff, so every read that carries them is marked untrusted_content with a note telling the model to treat the text as data, not instructions. pup_list_plans, pup_get_plan, pup_get_school and pup_get_student take raw: true for the untouched API record (still marked untrusted) — the only way to see fields such as SASId or SafetyFlag.

Writes — every one asks you to confirm first. A client that can show a confirmation prompt (Claude Code) shows one, unless MCP_CONFIRM_ELICITATION=off. Otherwise the first call makes no change and returns a preview of the exact payload it would send plus a confirmToken, and only a repeat call with that token makes the change — see Confirmations.

Confirmations

A token is single-use and bound to the exact payload. The second call re-reads the student and rebuilds the payload, so if anything moved between the preview and the approval — a different date or option, or (for default plans, which round-trip the whole student record) a change made to the record meanwhile — nothing is sent and you get DRAFT_CHANGED with a fresh preview.

Two things the tools do that the API does not

Rules are enforced before anything is sent. Each dismissal option carries its own requirements — a note, a car number, an early-dismissal time, or a restriction to particular students. pup_set_plan checks them against the school's own list and refuses with the school's wording, so a rejected write is a validation message rather than an opaque 400.

Writes are verified by re-reading. A 2xx from PickUp Patrol is not proof: a change made after the school's cutoff is accepted and silently ignored. Every write re-reads the affected dates and compares the transportation id and the note — never ModifiedDate, which advances on its own and would make every write look successful. The note is part of the proof because every dismissal option seen so far requires one, which makes a note-only edit ordinary: an id-only comparison would report success from a field that never had to move. The result says verified: true/false, and names the dates that did not move.

Without the MCP server

skills/pickuppatrol-api/ is a shell-out skill covering the same API with curl and jq, for scripts or a machine where the server is not installed.

Development

npm install
npm run build
npm test              # fast
npm run test:coverage # coverage-enforced at 100%

Tests never touch the network: the transport is injected, and the MCP tools run through a real in-memory client/server pair.

Two things about the API worth knowing

GetPlanEdit returns a date's override, not the effective plan. A date with no specific plan reads back TransportationId: null even when the student has a weekly default for that weekday. pup_get_plan passes that through as-is; pup_list_students is where the weekly defaults live.

Sign-in is a session cookie, not a JWT. Authenticate returns BearerToken: null on this deployment and sets ss-id/ss-pid/ss-opt. The client keeps whichever the server returns and sends both, so a future switch to JWTs needs no change here.

Safety notes

• A rejected sign-in is never retried. PickUp Patrol counts failed attempts against the account and a lockout clears only through their support desk, so the error is cached and every later call fails instantly with the same message.
• The weekly-default write is a read-modify-write of the whole student record, because the API has no default-plans endpoint. The server always reads the student immediately before writing, and changes only DefaultPlans.
• Credentials live in .env (gitignored) or the MCP host's config, and are never written to a result or a log.

License

MIT