Geocode city and place names to lat/lng coordinates via geocode-mcp (uvx)

geocode-mcp (uvx) — geocode place names to lat/lng via OpenStreetMap Nominatim

Package: geocode-mcp v0.2.0 on PyPI Transport: stdio via uvx geocode-mcp Auth: none — uses the free OpenStreetMap Nominatim API Tools: 1 (get_coordinates)

What it does

Takes a human-readable location string (city name, address, landmark) and returns latitude/longitude coordinates, bounding box, display name, place type, and importance score from OpenStreetMap Nominatim. Supports limit parameter (1–10) to get multiple matches.

Recipe

1.  uvx geocode-mcp                         # start server (stdio)
2.  → initialize                             # MCP handshake
3.  → notifications/initialized
4.  → tools/call  get_coordinates            # geocode the place
       { "location": "Istanbul, Turkey", "limit": 1 }

Real trace (Istanbul)

Request:

{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":2,"method":"tools/call","params":{"name":"get_coordinates","arguments":{"location":"Istanbul, Turkey","limit":1}}}

Response:

{
  "query": "Istanbul, Turkey",
  "results_count": 1,
  "coordinates": [{
    "latitude": 41.006381,
    "longitude": 28.9758715,
    "display_name": "İstanbul, Fatih, İstanbul, Marmara Bölgesi, 34122, Türkiye",
    "place_id": 59494190,
    "type": "city",
    "class": "place",
    "importance": 0.783,
    "bounding_box": { "south": 40.846, "north": 41.166, "west": 28.816, "east": 29.136 }
  }]
}

Second trace (San Francisco, limit=2)

Request: {"location": "San Francisco, CA", "limit": 2} Response: lat=37.7879, lng=-122.4075, displayname="San Francisco, California, United States", boundingbox south=37.640 north=37.930.

Failure modes

• Nominatim rate-limits aggressive callers (max 1 req/s by convention). If an agent batches many geocode calls, space them out.
• Ambiguous queries (e.g. "Springfield") return the most "important" match by default — use limit > 1 to see alternatives.
• The server sets isError: false on valid empty results (no matches), so agents should check results_count.

When to use

Any agent task that starts with a human-readable place and needs coordinates: mapping, routing, weather lookup (chain with open-meteo), travel planning, geofencing, distance calculations. This is the credential-free alternative to Google Geocoding API.