An MCP server for country data — connect any AI to countries.dev

If your AI assistant can speak the Model Context Protocol, it can now query countries.dev directly. There's one hosted URL to add — no key, no install, no local server to keep running.

The endpoint

https://countries.dev/api/mcp

It's a remote MCP server over the Streamable HTTP transport, so any compatible client connects with just the URL.

Add it to your client

# Claude Code
claude mcp add --transport http countries https://countries.dev/api/mcp

For Cursor, ChatGPT and others, drop the URL into the standard config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "countries": { "url": "https://countries.dev/api/mcp" }
  }
}

What the model gets

A set of read-only tools, each mapping to a documented REST endpoint:

get_country / list_countries / get_borders — countries by code or name, filtered lists, and neighbours
search_cities / search_places — cities by population, or the full GeoNames gazetteer (mountains, lakes, landmarks)
reverse_geocode / distance — coordinates to a place name, and great-circle distance between two points
lookup_postal_code — ZIP/postal code to place and coordinates
geolocate_ip — country for an IP address
random_country / list_reference_data — a random country, and the distinct regions/currencies/languages/timezones

So a prompt like "how far is Tokyo from Osaka, and what currency do they use?" resolves against live data instead of the model's memory.

Country results are lean by default — the bulky translations, altSpellings, maps and regionalBlocs fields are dropped unless you ask for them with fields: "full". The same applies to the REST API via ?full=true.

It's just HTTP

The server is stateless and standards-compliant, so you can poke it without any MCP client at all:

curl -s https://countries.dev/api/mcp \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -H 'accept: application/json, text/event-stream' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/list"}'

New here? Start on the MCP server page. Prefer raw REST? Every tool is also a plain endpoint — see the API reference or the MCP setup guide.