KItenerary MCP

A thin wrapper to deterministicalty extract travel information out of a document

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kitinerary-mcp

An MCP server that wraps KDE's kitinerary-extractor CLI: give it a travel confirmation email, PDF ticket, or Apple/Google Wallet .pkpass file, and it returns whatever structured schema.org Reservation JSON-LD the file contains — deterministically, with no LLM in the loop.

Most real airline/hotel confirmation emails already embed this JSON-LD (it's the same markup Gmail parses for its own "smart" trip cards). kitinerary-extractor reads it straight out, along with structured PDF tickets and Wallet passes that plain text/regex extraction can't touch. This server is a thin, stateless shim around that binary so any MCP client can call it.

What this is (and isn't)

  • Is: a single tool, extract_booking, that takes a file and returns raw JSON-LD (or nothing, if the extractor finds nothing). No outbound network calls, no secrets, no state — every call is an isolated subprocess against a temp file, cleaned up immediately after.
  • Isn't: a booking-type mapper. It does not translate the JSON-LD into any particular app's reservation schema — that's a deliberate boundary, so this stays reusable across whatever consumer calls it rather than coupled to one caller's data model.

How it's used

This server powers the deterministic extraction stage of a self-hosted TripIt replacement: forward a booking confirmation email, an n8n workflow calls extract_booking on it, and a matched result gets mapped and written into Trek as a trip — no LLM involved for the common case, with an LLM fallback only for emails this server finds nothing in. See tripit_replacement.md in that pipeline's repo for the full architecture, the JSON-LD-to-booking mapping table this server's output feeds into, and the gotchas found integrating it (some datetime fields come back as {"@type":"QDateTime",...} objects rather than plain strings, multi-leg/multi-passenger handling, and more).

That pipeline is one consumer, not a dependency this server has on it — nothing in this repo is coupled to it, and any MCP client can use extract_booking the same way. If you build something else on top of this server, opening a PR to list it here is welcome.

Tool interface

extract_booking(file_base64: str, filename: str, context_date: str | None = None) -> {
  items: object[],    # the raw JSON-LD array kitinerary-extractor emitted (possibly empty)
  warnings: string[], # e.g. "unsupported file type", "no reservation data found in file"
}
  • file_base64 — the file's raw bytes, base64-encoded (MCP tool args are JSON, so there's no binary/multipart transport at this layer).
  • filename — used to infer format from the extension. Accepted: .eml, .pdf, .pkpass, .html, .txt. Anything else is rejected with a warning, not silently passed through.
  • context_date — optional ISO date/time, forwarded to kitinerary-extractor --context-date. Helps resolve dates that don't state a year or are relative to "today" (pass the email's own Date: header if you have it).
  • No match is not an error — you get back items: [] with a warning. Tool errors are reserved for genuine failures: the binary is missing, the process crashed, or the file exceeds the size cap.
  • Limits: 10 MB decoded file size, 60s extraction timeout. Both fail cleanly (a warning, or a tool error) rather than hanging or crashing the caller.

Running it

docker run --rm -i ghcr.io/mrwulf/kitinerary-mcp:v0.1.0

It speaks MCP over stdio. Wire it into any MCP client's stdio server config, e.g. Claude Desktop's claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "kitinerary": {
      "command": "docker",
      "args": ["run", "--rm", "-i", "ghcr.io/mrwulf/kitinerary-mcp:v0.1.0"]
    }
  }
}

Or point a ToolHive MCPServer at the same image with transport: stdio — no secrets, no volumes needed.

Always pin an exact tag; latest is published alongside each release for convenience but isn't meant to be what you deploy against.

Tags and version strings

Every release publishes three tags:

  • vX.Y.Z — this server's own version, e.g. v0.1.0. Pin this in normal use.
  • vX.Y.Z-kitineraryA.B.C — the same build, with the bundled kitinerary-extractor release folded into the tag (e.g. v0.1.0-kitinerary24.12.3), so you can tell which upstream KDE release a given build carries without pulling it or reading the Dockerfile. Pin this instead if your own compatibility depends on a specific kitinerary behavior.
  • latest — convenience only, not for pinning.

The same two version numbers are also on the image itself, so you don't have to trust the tag alone: as OCI labels (org.opencontainers.image.version, io.github.mrwulf.kitinerary-mcp.kitinerary-version) readable via docker inspect, and in the running server's own MCP version field (0.1.0+kitinerary.24.12.3, semver build-metadata form) that any MCP client can read after connecting.

Development

python3 -m venv .venv && .venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt pytest

# Fast unit tests (mock the CLI subprocess, no image build needed)
.venv/bin/pytest tests/test_server.py -v

# Real end-to-end tests against the actual kitinerary-extractor binary
docker build -t kitinerary-mcp:test .
IMAGE_TAG=kitinerary-mcp:test .venv/bin/pytest tests/test_integration.py -v

Dependency footprint

libkitinerary-bin pulls in a genuine KDE Frameworks 6 + Qt 6 chain (yes, including libqt6gui6/libqt6qml6, even for this headless CLI use) — there's no slimmer package upstream, so expect a multi-hundred-MB image. This is a tradeoff of using the reference KDE implementation rather than reimplementing extraction logic from scratch, which would mean re-deriving and maintaining parsers for every airline/hotel/rail JSON-LD dialect ourselves.

License

This repository's own code (server.py and supporting files) is MIT-licensed. The built image additionally includes KDE's kitinerary library, which is LGPL-2.0-or-later (confirmed from /usr/share/doc/libkitinerary-bin/copyright in the Debian trixie package, version 24.12.3-1). This server only invokes kitinerary-extractor as a subprocess — it does not link against libkitinerary — so using this image imposes no LGPL obligations on your own application code; the obligations that do apply (source availability for the library itself, etc.) are already satisfied by Debian's own package distribution.

Keeping this current as kitinerary grows

Two independently-versioned things need tracking, and Renovate handles them differently:

  1. This image's own published tag — a normal container reference; any downstream consumer's tooling (Renovate, Flux, etc.) tracks it exactly like any other pinned image.

  2. The libkitinerary-bin/libkitinerary-data apt package versions pinned in the Dockerfile — Renovate has no native Debian-apt datasource, so these are pinned exactly (never a bare apt-get install with no version) and annotated for a customManagers regex against KDE/kitinerary's GitHub releases as a freshness signal:

    # renovate: depName=KDE/kitinerary datasource=github-releases
ARG KITINERARY_VERSION=24.12.3

    Debian's version string tracks upstream KDE Gear releases closely but appends its own revision suffix (-1, -2, ...) that a Renovate bump can't verify still resolves in the trixie archive on build day. If it doesn't, the CI build simply fails loudly — an accepted, visible failure mode rather than trying to fully automate around Debian's package cadence.

  3. The Python mcp SDK version — pinned in requirements.txt; any pip-aware dependency bot (Renovate, Dependabot) tracks this natively.

Acceptance test

The fixtures in tests/fixtures/ and tests/test_integration.py cover the smoke test this server is expected to pass before any release: a synthetic hotel confirmation with embedded LodgingReservation JSON-LD extracts correctly, a plain marketing email with no structured data returns an empty result with a warning (not an error), and an oversized file is rejected cleanly.