prothomalo-mcp

An MCP server that lets an AI assistant search and read Prothom Alo — Bangladesh's largest Bengali-language newspaper.

Built with FastMCP. Works in Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible client.

Unofficial. This project is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Prothom Alo or Mediastar Ltd. It is an independent client for endpoints the site already serves publicly.

What it does

Tool	Purpose
search_news(query, limit)	Keyword search across the archive. Works in Bengali and English.
latest_news(section, limit)	Newest articles, optionally filtered to one section.
read_article(url_or_slug)	Full article text for a single story.
list_sections(contains)	Browse the ~356 available section slugs.

Useful for media monitoring, brand and competitor mention tracking, or researching how a topic is being covered in Bangladeshi press.

Install

Requires uv and Python 3.12+.

git clone https://github.com/Claudefarid/prothomalo-mcp.git
cd prothomalo-mcp
uv sync

No API key, login, or paid subscription is needed.

Connect to a client

uv run fastmcp install claude-code server.py:mcp     # Claude Code
uv run fastmcp install claude-desktop server.py:mcp  # Claude Desktop
uv run fastmcp install cursor server.py:mcp          # Cursor

Restart the client afterwards. Then just ask it things like "What has Prothom Alo published about startups this week?"

Verify it works

uv run python test_server.py

How it works

Prothom Alo runs on the Quintype CMS, which exposes a public JSON API under /api/v1/. The site's robots.txt permits these paths — it disallows only /api/auth/, /api/comments/get_comments_json, and /story/*/element/. No HTML scraping is involved.

Endpoints used:

Endpoint	Used for
/api/v1/search?q=	Keyword search
/api/v1/stories?limit=	Latest articles
/api/v1/stories-by-slug?slug=	Full article body
/api/v1/config	Section list

API quirks worth knowing

If you're building against this API yourself, these cost me some time:

• /api/v1/advanced-search does not respect recency. Querying section-name=bangladesh returns articles from 2014. It's an archive search, not a news feed.
• section= is silently ignored. The parameter is section-name. Passing section returns unfiltered results rather than an error — easy to miss.
• /api/v1/stories returns genuinely current articles but has no working section filter. So latest_news() fetches the newest 100 and filters client-side. A quiet section may therefore return fewer items than requested; the tool reports this rather than failing silently.

Please be considerate

Prothom Alo's articles are their copyrighted work. This tool is intended for personal research, monitoring, and summarization — not for republishing their content. Requests identify themselves via User-Agent. Keep your volume reasonable; don't hammer their servers.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. The license covers this code only, not any content retrieved through it.