Open Contracting MCP Server

@pipeworx/open-contracting

Open Contracting MCP — international public procurement: government tenders and contract awards published under the OCDS (Open Contracting Data Standard). Mirrors bulk OCDS releases from 19 national and subnational publishers — 838,000+ contracting processes — refreshed weekly from the OCP Data Registry.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1856+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

• oc_tender_search(query, country, status, category, min_value, days, limit) — free-text search over tender title, buyer and description. See Language matching — the query works in English even where the data is not.
• oc_recent(country, days, limit) — newest releases first, the "what just came out" view.
• oc_process_history(ocid) — every release for one contracting process, in order, showing the tender → award → contract progression.
• oc_coverage() — per-country publisher, release and process counts, and latest-release freshness. Call it first to see what is actually there.

Auth

None for the caller. The gateway injects the pack's data credentials — it reads the OCDS bulk publications over PostgREST, so a query resolves against one backing store rather than depending on 19 separate upstream APIs being up at once.

Keep the wording here descriptive of WHAT is returned, not of where it is served from: pnpm check:hosting-claims fails the build on published copy that tells callers we hold a copy of upstream data, and this file is published (it generates docs/reference/open-contracting/). That gate red-lined main for nine consecutive pushes on 2026-08-23.

Language matching

Only 7 of the 19 publishers file their tender text in English. The rest publish in their own language, and the tool description and country argument are both in English, so an English question used to hit a silent zero: {"query":"Ministry of Health","country":"Dominican Republic"} returned 0 of 40,740 processes, while "Ministerio de Salud" returned rows.

oc_tender_search now expands the query instead of translating it. The phrase you passed is always searched; alongside it go its equivalents in the language of the country you filtered to, drawn from a synonym table of the buyer and subject words these corpora actually use (ministry / ministerio / ministria / ministarstvo / ministero / กระทรวง, and ~45 more). Every spelling rides in one PostgREST or=(...), which is a single SQL predicate — the branches union, so a row matching several is still returned once and there is no second round trip.

Three properties worth knowing:

• It expands, never replaces. These corpora are mixed, not consistently one language, so rewriting the query one way would drop whatever is filed the other way. A native-language query keeps working and can only gain rows.
• The lookup is bidirectional, which is also the accent fix. A caller who types Ministerio de Educacion gets the stored MINISTERIO DE EDUCACIÓN, because the unaccented Spanish token resolves through the same table to the accented stored form. That keeps every pattern fully literal, so the trigram index still applies.
• It says what it searched. The response carries query_match.searched (the spellings) and query_match.publisher_language. A zero result returns a hint naming the publisher's language, rather than a bare count: 0 that teaches the caller the data is absent when it is present.

* inside a spelling is the wildcard between words, so ministerio*salud matches MINISTERIO DE SALUD PÚBLICA. Word order is tried both ways for two-word phrases, since it flips between languages ("road construction" is filed as "construcción de carreteras").

For an English publisher no vocabulary is substituted — only connector tolerance and word order, so Ministry Health and health ministry both reach MINISTRY OF HEALTH.

Data sources

• OCP Data Registry (bulk OCDS downloads): https://data.open-contracting.org/
• Open Contracting Data Standard: https://standard.open-contracting.org/
• Publishers include Guatecompras (GT), OECE (PE), DGCP (DO), ARCE (UY), ONCAE (HN), ANAC (IT), Narodne Novine (HR), PPRC (XK), PPC (AL), BMA (TH), and the national procurement authorities of KE, NG, GH, ZM, LR, RW, TZ.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "open-contracting": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/open-contracting/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/open-contracting/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1856+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/oc_tender_search \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"query":"Ministry of Health","country":"Dominican Republic","limit":5}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/oc_tender_search. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Run it from npm

@pipeworx/mcp-open-contracting is a local stdio bridge to the Pipeworx gateway: your MCP client starts it with npx, and it forwards every call to the same https://gateway.pipeworx.io/open-contracting/mcp endpoint shown above. It needs network access; there is no offline mode.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "open-contracting": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-open-contracting"]
    }
  }
}

Without a key it calls anonymously, capped at 50 calls a day. A free account raises that to 200 a day: get a key at https://pipeworx.io/signup and add "env": { "PIPEWORX_API_KEY": "<your key>" } to the server entry. The key is sent as a Bearer token, the same way a hosted connection sends it, so calls are metered and billed exactly as they are there.

It lists only this pack's tools by default. Set PIPEWORX_META_TOOLS=1 to also list ask_pipeworx and the other gateway-wide tools.

Behind an HTTPS proxy: Node's built-in fetch does not read HTTPS_PROXY by default. Newer Node releases honour it when NODE_USE_ENV_PROXY=1 is set; check your Node version's documentation.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Open Contracting data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT