School Attendance

You run a dedicated MCP server that exposes tools to manage school attendance and interact with GitHub repositories. It uses the MCP protocol over HTTP to let Codex/Cursor and other MCP clients call commands like marking attendance, committing changes, and querying repository information, all through a structured, JSON-RPC like interface.

How to use

To use this MCP server, connect your MCP client to the provided MCP endpoint and invoke the available tools. You can mark student attendance, push updates to GitHub, and fetch repository information. The server exposes a status endpoint you can query to verify it is running and to discover the available tools.

How to install

Prerequisites: ensure you have Node.js installed on your system (Node.js 14+ is recommended). You may also need a GitHub personal access token with repo access for operations that modify repositories.

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Create environment file with GitHub token
GITHUB_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN=your_github_token_here

# Run in development mode
npm run start:dev

# Build for production and start
npm run build
npm run start:prod

By default, the server starts on http://localhost:3001 and exposes the MCP endpoint at http://localhost:3001/mcp and a status endpoint at http://localhost:3001/mcp/status.

Configuration and usage notes

Environment variable shown for authentication with GitHub is GITHUB_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN. This value should be kept secret and can be provided via a .env file or your hosting environment.

To connect a Codex/Cursor client, add a MCP server entry pointing to the MCP URL and enable JSON-RPC over HTTP with the appropriate headers if needed.

Common endpoints to verify server status and tool availability are the status endpoint and the tools list, respectively.

Troubleshooting and notes

If the server fails to start, verify that required environment variables are set and that port 3001 is not in use by another process. Check logs for errors related to the MCP controller or GitHub client initialization.

Security tip: use a token with the minimal required scopes for repository operations and rotate tokens periodically.

Available tools

mark_attendance

Marks attendance for a student with a specified date and status (present, absent, or late).

commit_changes

Commits a set of files to a specified GitHub repository on a selected branch with a given commit message.

get_repo_info

Fetches information about a specified GitHub repository, including metadata and status.

create_branch

Creates a new branch in the target repository.

list_branches

Lists branches available in the target repository.

get_file_contents

Retrieves the contents of a specified file from the repository.

list_commits

Lists recent commits for the target repository.