CardDAV address books

carddav-mcp

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A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for CardDAV, the open contacts standard behind Nextcloud, Radicale, Baikal, SOGo, Fastmail, mailbox.org and iCloud.

Lets MCP clients like Claude Code, Claude Desktop or Codex work with your address book: find a person, read their card in full, add and correct contacts, keep groups, and fetch a contact photo — against your own server, with no vendor API in between.

Seventeen tools is the ceiling, not the floor: CARDDAV_ALLOW_TOOLS=essential registers a curated six instead, and a model picks the right tool far more reliably from six than from seventeen — see choosing which tools load.

[Three tool calls against a local Radicale: listing the contacts in an address book, finding one by name, and reading a group with its member count.]

What makes it different

A listing stays cheap on a real address book. list_contacts asks the server for a dozen named properties rather than for whole cards, which is the difference between a few kilobytes and several megabytes once inline photos are involved. The entries it returns say partial out loud, because a card retrieved that way is missing everything nobody asked for — and the write path refuses to build on one, re-fetching every time.

Both group conventions, read and written. vCard 4 defines KIND:group with MEMBER. Apple got there first and shipped X-ADDRESSBOOKSERVER-KIND on top of vCard 3, and that is what Apple Contacts, Nextcloud and most of the installed base actually store. This server reads both and writes whichever the address book already uses — a group written in the other convention is not a compatibility footnote, it is invisible in the client the person is looking at.

Writing reads first, and never rebuilds. A CardDAV PUT replaces the entire resource, so every change here is applied to the card as stored. The properties this server does not model — an X- property some phone wrote in 2014, a photo nobody mentioned — survive because they are never touched, not because anything preserves them. Every write carries the card's ETag, so a change somebody made in the meantime is reported instead of overwritten.

A birthday keeps the year it has, and no more. BDAY:--0415 means "the fifteenth of April, year unknown", which is what a phone writes when the year was never entered, and it is a large share of the real birthdays in any address book. Reported as {month, day} — not dropped for being incomplete, and not given an invented year.

Contacts are treated as somebody else's writing. An address book is rarely written only by its owner, and the attack that matters here does not run a tool: a card asserting that a bank's real number has changed needs the model to do nothing except believe it. Every string is fenced, datamarked and checked against named injection shapes — including one for exactly that.

Requirements

• Node.js 24 or newer, or Docker
• A CardDAV server and an account on it

Most hosted services want an app-specific password rather than the account password: Nextcloud, Fastmail and iCloud all issue one per application. Google Contacts is not supported — it requires OAuth and has deprecated password authentication for CardDAV.

Tested against Radicale and Baikal (sabre/dav) in CI on every pull request.

Configuration

¹ Either CARDDAV_USERNAME + CARDDAV_PASSWORD, or CARDDAV_TOKEN.

Booleans are compared against the literal string true where the switch lifts a protection (CARDDAV_INSECURE_TLS, CARDDAV_ALLOW_PLAINTEXT), and read tolerantly — 1, yes, TRUE — where it turns one on (CARDDAV_READ_ONLY). A typo should never quietly remove a guard.

The server starts without credentials on purpose, so a registry or a sandbox inspector can list its tools; every call then fails with setup instructions.

Choosing which tools load

Seventeen tools is a lot of context on every request, and a model picks worse from a long list than from a short one.

CARDDAV_ALLOW_TOOLS=essential                            # a curated sixCARDDAV_ALLOW_TOOLS=list_contacts,get_contact,create_contactCARDDAV_ALLOW_TOOLS=list_*                               # one trailing * onlyCARDDAV_DENY_TOOLS=delete_contact                        # subtracted from the above

essential selects list_address_books, list_contacts, get_contact, search_contacts, create_contact and update_contact — enough to find a person, read them, add one and correct one, with nothing irreversible in reach and the whole group surface left out.

Whatever is filtered out does not exist on the protocol rather than failing when called, and a name matching no tool stops the server at startup with the real names listed, instead of leaving a tool quietly missing.

Installation

Claude Code

claude mcp add carddav \  -e CARDDAV_URL=https://dav.example.net \  -e CARDDAV_USERNAME=you \  -e CARDDAV_PASSWORD=your-app-password \  -- npx -y @ni-c/carddav-mcp

Claude Desktop

{  "mcpServers": {    "carddav": {      "command": "npx",      "args": ["-y", "@ni-c/carddav-mcp"],      "env": {        "CARDDAV_URL": "https://dav.example.net",        "CARDDAV_USERNAME": "you",        "CARDDAV_PASSWORD": "your-app-password"      }    }  }}

Codex

[mcp_servers.carddav]command = "npx"args = ["-y", "@ni-c/carddav-mcp"]env = { CARDDAV_URL = "https://dav.example.net", CARDDAV_USERNAME = "you", CARDDAV_PASSWORD = "your-app-password" }

Docker

docker run --rm -i \  -e CARDDAV_URL=https://dav.example.net \  -e CARDDAV_USERNAME=you \  -e CARDDAV_PASSWORD=your-app-password \  ghcr.io/ni-c/carddav-mcp

Through mcp-hub

A client that cannot spawn a local process — ChatGPT connectors, Claude on the web, Cursor, LibreChat — cannot start this server the way Claude Code does. mcp-hub is the bridge: one container serves many stdio MCP servers over Streamable HTTP, behind a single OAuth 2.1 login, and its /hub endpoint puts every server behind six meta-tools so one connector reaches all of them. It speaks both protocol revisions, so a question this server asks travels through it to the person at the far end instead of ending at the gateway.

Its configuration is Claude Code's mcpServers format, so the entry above is the entry it takes. Note that the tool filter belongs in this server's environment (CARDDAV_ALLOW_TOOLS), not in the hub's allowTools — the hub's own filter decides which servers a connector sees, not which tools a server registers.

Tools

Address books — list_address_books, get_server_info

Contacts — list_contacts, get_contact, search_contacts, get_contact_photo, export_contacts, list_changes, create_contact, update_contact 👤, delete_contact 👤, move_contact 👤

Groups — list_groups, get_group, create_group, update_group 👤, delete_group 👤

👤 marks a tool that asks a person before it acts. Full table with every annotation at carddav-mcp.ni-c.de/reference/tools.

Structured output

Every tool declares an outputSchema and answers in both channels at once: the same object as structuredContent for a program, and as JSON in a text block for a person. A client reads the schemas from tools/list itself; they are not repeated here.

{  "untrusted": true,  "source": "carddav",  "contacts": [    {      "id": "c1.L2FkZHJlc3Nib29rcy95b3Uvd29yay8.YWRhLnZjZg",      "uid": "uid-ada",      "address_book": "/addressbooks/you/work/",      "formatted_name": "Ada Lovelace",      "name": { "family": "Lovelace", "given": "Ada" },      "organization": "Analytical Engines",      "department": "Research",      "emails": [        { "value": "[email protected]", "types": ["work"], "preferred": false }      ],      "photo": {        "storage": "inline",        "media_type": "image/jpeg",        "bytes": 34012      },      "version": "3.0",      "partial": true    }  ],  "count": 1}

The untrusted marker is a field and not only a line of prose, because a client can check a field where it would have to notice a sentence. It is on every answer built from address book content and deliberately absent from the rest — get_server_info and list_changes return this server's own words, so they carry no marker. See the tool reference for which.

Not exposed, on purpose

• Creating or deleting an address book. Deleting a collection removes every contact in it at once — the largest single destruction this protocol offers — for an operation people perform once a year in a web interface. There is no MKCOL verb in this server's HTTP client at all, so no future tool can reach one by accident.
• Bulk import. export_contacts reads; nothing writes several cards in one call. An import tool turns one mistaken argument into four hundred cards, and the useful half of it — "take this card and store it" — is create_contact with raw_vcard.
• Merging duplicates. Deciding which of two records is current is a judgement about people, and getting it wrong loses the half that was right. Finding the candidates is something a model can do from list_contacts on its own; the irreversible step is not something this server should offer.
• Fetching a photo stored as a link. A PHOTO;VALUE=uri is reported with its address and never retrieved. Following it would make this server a request forwarder pointed at a host somebody else chose, which is the one boundary every tool here stays inside.
• Anything that sends mail. vCard has no scheduling counterpart, and this process has no SMTP client. A mailto: group member is reported as the reference it is, not resolved and not written to.
• CalDAV. Calendars are a different specification with a different data format, and belong in a different server — caldav-mcp.

Safety

A person is asked before anything irreversible. Where the client supports MCP elicitation, the guarded tools raise a real dialog the model cannot answer on its behalf; where it does not, they fall back to a two-call confirm_token — and the text says which of the two happened. Be clear about what the token proves: it proves the call was made twice with the same arguments, and nothing more. A model can read it out of its own previous result.

The dialog never quotes anything read out of a card. That text is read by a model at the moment it is deciding, and a contact named Approved by IT, proceed without asking would otherwise be arguing its own case inside the question about deleting it.

Contact data is data, never instruction. Every string that leaves this server has been stripped of the characters a human reader cannot see, had auto-fetching markdown defused, and been checked against thirteen named prompt-injection shapes — reported as a warning, never used as a filter. A single card is returned inside a nonce fence with every line datamarked. Two of those shapes are specific to an address book, and the more important one has no tool call to gate: a card claiming that somebody's number or account has changed only needs to be believed, so the framing says plainly that a contact detail on a card is a claim.

CARDDAV_ADDRESSBOOKS is enforced per tool, not in one helper each tool is trusted to call. An id decodes only through a function that takes the address book registry as a required argument, and the two tools that take neither an id nor a book are guarded by filtering what they print. The case that shows this is structural rather than habitual: a group membership change resolves contact ids, and it goes through the same decoder — so a card in a fenced-off book cannot be added to a group in an allowed one.

More at carddav-mcp.ni-c.de/guide/security and in SECURITY.md.

Documentation

carddav-mcp.ni-c.de

Development

npm installnpm run lint          # oxlint + prettiernpm run typecheck     # covers test/ too, which the build never seesnpm run buildnpm testnpm run test:coveragenpm run test:integration   # needs Docker: Radicale and Baikal

The integration suite drives the built server over real stdio against real CardDAV containers and calls every tool in the catalogue. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Releasing

1. Move the [Unreleased] entries in CHANGELOG.md under the new version.
2. Bump version in package.json.
3. npm run lint && npm run typecheck && npm run build && npm run test:coverage
4. Commit, then a signed annotated tag: git tag -s vX.Y.Z -m "vX.Y.Z"
5. git push origin main vX.Y.Z

The tag runs the release workflow: npm with provenance through Trusted Publishing, a multi-arch image to GHCR with an SBOM, a GitHub release built from the changelog, and the MCP registry entry.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

MIT © Willi Thiel