NTNU Courses (unofficial)

ntnu-mcp

A remote MCP server that exposes NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) course data to LLM assistants; course catalog search, teaching schedules, weekly timetables, grade statistics, course descriptions, exam logistics, and study programs with their official study plans, plus comparison tools for students choosing between courses. Runs as a Cloudflare Worker; no installation required on the client side.

Tools

Twelve tools, all read-only:

• search_courses — free-text search of NTNU's course catalog for a given year; returns codes, names, campus, and exam dates.
• get_course_schedule — every dated teaching activity (lectures, labs) for a course in a year, with Oslo-local times and rooms.
• get_weekly_timetable — the recurring weekly timetable grid for a course: weekday, times, ISO-week ranges, and rooms.
• get_grade_distribution — historical grade distribution for a course, per year and semester, with counts and percentages.
• get_course_versions — the DBH-versioned course codes (e.g. TDT4100-1) behind a bare course code, useful when grade lookups come back empty.
• get_semesters — NTNU's terms with ids like 26h/26v, teaching weeks, exam-period dates, and which term is current.
• get_course_info — everything about a course except exam logistics: credits, level, campus, prerequisites, mandatory activities, content/learning outcomes, credit reductions, the study programs the teaching is planned for, contacts, and alert notices. English by default, language: "nb" for Norwegian.
• get_exam_info — exam logistics for up to 10 courses in one call: every occasion (ordinary/re-sit) with date, start time, duration, permitted-aids code ("hjelpemiddelkode") with its meaning, exam system, and assigned rooms.
• search_study_programs — search NTNU's ~400 study programs by text, level, and city; returns program codes for get_study_plan.
• get_study_plan — the official plan for a program and cohort intake year: courses (codes, credits, mandatory/elective) per semester, with specialization choice points — the bridge from "I study X" to concrete course codes.
• compare_courses — side-by-side comparison of several courses: name, campus, exam dates, weekly teaching hours, and latest grade distribution.
• check_timetable_conflicts — pairwise check for weekly-schedule clashes and exam-date collisions across a set of courses, before registering for them.

Connecting

Paste the server's MCP URL into Claude's or ChatGPT's custom connector settings:

https://ntnu-mcp.martinsundal.no/mcp

The server requires no authentication, since it only serves public, read-only NTNU course data.

The server is also listed in the official MCP registry as io.github.MartinSA04/ntnu-mcp (see server.json); clients that browse the registry can discover it there. It is an unofficial community server, not affiliated with NTNU. Registry updates are tag-driven: npm version <patch|minor|major> && git push --follow-tags — the version script keeps server.json in sync, and the release workflow runs the check suite, deploys the Worker, re-publishes the registry entry (GitHub OIDC), and creates the GitHub Release.

Architecture

All NTNU upstream knowledge — endpoints, retry policy, parsing of the Liferay catalog, DBH grade statistics, and TP semester data — lives in the ntnu-api TypeScript client library, which this repo depends on as an npm package. Upstream fixes and new data sources land in ntnu-api, not here. This repo's only job is to call that typed client and shape its output for LLM consumption: English names with Norwegian fallback, Oslo-local timestamps, grade rows collapsed into per-term distribution tables, and guidance notes on empty results. This layering is set out in ntnu-api's TypeScript migration spec.

To keep load on NTNU's servers minimal, every upstream call is cached in two tiers (per-isolate memory in front of a shared Workers KV namespace), so each resource is fetched roughly once per TTL globally: catalog searches, timetables, and schedules for 1 hour; grade statistics and the semester list for 24 hours. KV failures degrade to memory-only caching, never to tool errors. In tests the cache runs memory-only.

Local development

Requires Node 22 (pinned via mise).

mise install     # installs the pinned Node version
npm install

Common tasks, available both as mise tasks and npm scripts:

mise run dev          # npm run dev       — wrangler dev, local worker with hot reload
mise run test          # npm test          — vitest, over captured fixtures (no live network)
mise run typecheck     # npm run typecheck — tsc --noEmit
mise run lint          # npm run lint      — biome check
mise run fmt           # npm run fmt       — biome check --write
mise run check         # lint + typecheck + test

Tests run under plain Node (not the Workers pool) with vitest, driving the tool functions directly against fetch fixtures captured verbatim from ntnu-api's test suite — no calls to real NTNU services are made in CI or locally.

Deploy

Pushes to main deploy automatically (the repo is connected to Cloudflare Workers Builds). For a manual deploy from a checkout:

npm run deploy   # wrangler deploy

Runs on Cloudflare's free plan: the MCP session state is backed by a Durable Object using SQLite storage, which is available on the free tier (no Workers Paid subscription required unless per-request CPU limits are hit at scale).

License

MIT — see LICENSE.