Every piece of mcnoaa-tides stands on the shoulders of open source projects built by people who decided to share their work. This page is a thank-you to all of them.
NOAA CO-OPS
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration runs the Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services — about 300 tide stations along every U.S. coast, measuring water levels every six minutes. Wind, pressure, temperature too. All of it published as free, public data through a REST API.
Without NOAA, there’s no mcnoaa-tides. Full stop.
These are the projects that make the MCP server run — the Python code that talks to NOAA’s API and translates it into something your assistant can use.
Model Context Protocol
MCP is the open standard that lets assistants use tools, read resources, and follow prompts from external servers. Think of it as a USB port for assistants — plug in a server, and the assistant gains new capabilities.
mcnoaa-tides is an MCP server. That’s how your assistant knows how to find tide stations, pull predictions, and generate charts.
FastMCP
FastMCP is the Python framework that makes building MCP servers feel like writing a regular Python app. Define a function, add type hints, and FastMCP handles the JSON-RPC transport, parameter validation, and error handling.
It’s the reason mcnoaa-tides can declare 14 tools, 4 prompts, and 3 resources in clean, readable code.
Python
Python — the language everything is written in. Specifically Python 3.12+, which brought nicer type syntax and faster startup times.
Pydantic
Pydantic validates data using Python type annotations. Every station record, tide prediction, and weather observation passes through a Pydantic model before it reaches your assistant. If the data is wrong, you find out immediately — not three tool calls later.
httpx
httpx is an async HTTP client for Python. It’s what actually makes the network requests to NOAA’s API endpoints — fetching tide predictions, water levels, and meteorological data. Fast, well-tested, and supports connection pooling out of the box.
When you ask for a tide chart or conditions dashboard, one of these two libraries does the rendering. They’re optional — the server works fine without them, but the visuals are worth installing.
Matplotlib
Matplotlib renders the PNG charts — the ones that show up inline in your conversation. It draws the tide curves, marks the highs and lows, overlays observed water levels. The classic scientific plotting library, used everywhere from research papers to satellite missions.
Plotly
Plotly generates interactive HTML
charts — the ones you can pan, zoom, and hover over for exact values.
Saves as a standalone .html file you can open in any browser. Great
for detailed analysis or sharing with someone who isn’t in a chat
window.
You’re reading this on a site built with these tools. The same maritime-teal theme, the animated wave hero, the conversation-style guides — it’s all thanks to this stack.
Astro
Astro is the web framework that builds this entire documentation site. It ships zero JavaScript by default — pages are static HTML until you need interactivity. Fast to load, fast to build, and designed for content-heavy sites like this one.
Starlight
Lucide
Lucide is the open-source icon library used throughout the site. Every little icon you see in cards, navigation, and badges is a Lucide SVG — lightweight, consistent, and beautifully drawn. Community-maintained fork of Feather Icons with 1,500+ icons.
Inter & JetBrains Mono
Inter is the sans-serif typeface for body text — designed for screens, optimized for readability at small sizes. JetBrains Mono is the monospace font for code blocks — ligatures, clear symbol distinction, and easy on the eyes during long reading sessions. Both served locally via Fontsource.
The infrastructure that builds, packages, and serves everything.
Docker
Docker packages the server and docs site into containers — self-contained environments that run the same way everywhere. The production docs site is a multi-stage build: Node.js compiles the static HTML, then Caddy serves it. No Node.js in production, just a tiny Alpine-based web server.
Caddy
Caddy is the web server that serves this site. It handles HTTPS automatically — gets certificates from Let’s Encrypt, renews them, and redirects HTTP to HTTPS. Zero configuration for TLS. The production Caddyfile is 9 lines long.
uv
PyPI
PyPI — the Python Package
Index — is where mcnoaa-tides gets published. When you run
uvx mcnoaa-tides or pip install mcnoaa-tides, PyPI is the registry
that serves the package.
Not visible in the final product, but essential for keeping the code clean and the tests passing.
Ruff
Ruff is an extremely fast Python linter and formatter — also from Astral. It replaces flake8, isort, black, and a dozen other tools with one binary that runs in milliseconds. Keeps the codebase consistent without slowing anyone down.
pytest
pytest runs the test suite. Combined with pytest-asyncio for testing the async MCP tools, it validates that station discovery works, tide predictions parse correctly, and the visualization pipeline doesn’t break.
Git
Open source isn’t just code. It’s people choosing to share solutions instead of hoarding them. Every project listed here represents thousands of hours of work by people who decided the world would be better if others could build on what they made.
If you use mcnoaa-tides and find it useful, consider contributing back to any of these projects — even a bug report, a documentation fix, or a thank-you in their issue tracker goes a long way.