Schulcloud holds the material for a lesson but not the lesson: this school's
course `times` are empty and it publishes the schedule in WebUntis. So "what
do I have today, and has anything been cancelled" was unanswerable, and the
timetable cannot be typed into a prompt either — it changes daily.
core/untis.ts talks to the API the Untis Mobile app uses, and three tools sit
on it: untis_timetable (a day or a range, Entfall, Vertretung, room changes,
the notes on each period, inline homework, the period id), untis_homework (the
class register's list, which is not Schulcloud's tasks) and
untis_lesson_topics (what earlier lessons of a series actually covered, which
is what says where a subject got to).
Read-only, but not by the Schulcloud client's rule: this API is JSON-RPC, so
every call is a POST, reads included. READ_METHODS is the guarantee instead,
enforced at the single choke point and asserted by a test. It matters because
the key can do what the app can — the live account holds W_OWN_ABSENCE, so
the same key could report the user absent.
What the live instance taught us, all recorded in docs/API.md:
- `startDateTime` ends in Z and is local time. The 08:00 lesson reports
08:00Z, so new Date() would move every lesson by an hour or two.
- A substitution is two periods, the original CANCELLED and the replacement
IRREGULAR beside it, not one period with a changed teacher.
- Announced tests live in the period's info text. The exam module is unused
here, so getExams2017 is always empty and that field carries the tests.
- A day with no lessons is not a holiday: the weeks this account spends in the
company simply have no periods.
- `?v=i3.2` is required, or the call fails with a Java NPE reported as -8998.
Errors arrive with HTTP 200 and an error member. -8504 is a rejected key and
-8524 a drifting clock; the tools name both, because no retry fixes either.
Configuration is all four UNTIS_* values or none — three are identifiers and
the fourth is a credential, so a half-filled block is a paste that went wrong.
Without them the tools are not registered at all, since a tool that can only
fail is worse than a missing one. whoami reports the WebUntis identity and
survives a dead Schulcloud session, so "is the server reachable" no longer
gets a misleadingly total no. mcp-env.sh switches WebUntis off for a fixture
run: that key belongs to the real school.
224 tests. All 10 WebUntis smoke checks pass, with a key and without one; the
Schulcloud checks in those runs answer 401 because this machine's session is
logged out.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Many teachers never use topics or boards; their material sits in the
course's file area, and the tools answered "0 files" for courses holding
dozens of worksheets — 21 of 26 courses on the live account. Persönliche,
Kurs-, Team- and Geteilte Dateien live in the legacy file store, not in
files-storage, and its service is not in the public ingress. The only way in
is the legacy client: HTML listings, and GET /files/signedurl for a
pre-signed download.
core/legacy-files.ts turns that into one path tree — /my, /courses/<course>,
/teams/<team>, /shared — resolving names that contain "/", ids anywhere in a
path, and wrong or ambiguous names with a message saying what is there. A
listing that does not parse throws; it never reads as an empty folder.
Some of the legacy client's GET routes write (GET /files/share/ mints a
share token), so getFileManagerPage allows only the listing routes, by
pattern. Signed URLs are fetched with no credentials and must be https.
- MCP: fs_list, fs_tree, fs_find and fs_read; get_course lists course files.
- CLI: schulcloud fs ls, tree, find and get, recursive and resumable.
- API: /api/fs/list, tree, find and file.
- Index: the crawl walks the file manager (INDEX_FILE_MANAGER, on by
default), so search covers the text inside those files and sync mirrors
them under <course>/Kurs-Dateien.
The local instance gains a fixture for all four areas. It needed a loopback,
so signed URLs open from the host, and a pre-created bucket, since MinIO
does not implement PutBucketCors.
135 tests. Smoke 55/55 live; 57/57 and 55/55 on the local instance.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every area — courses, rooms, boards, topics, tasks, files, quizzes, teams,
groups, submissions, grades — was checked for data the instance has and the
tools did not show.
Grades and feedback. A teacher's /homework page is a different page from a
student's: grade and comment live in the grading form, one block per
submission, so a teacher account reported every graded submission as having
neither. parseTeacherGrading reads the form, and list_submissions can now
include the written feedback and who handed the work in.
Names. /api/v1 is partly served: courses, users and classes survive in the
deployment's ingress table, and users/{id} is the only route from an id to a
name. Submitters, file creators and course teachers resolve through it, and
degrade to "not visible to this account" where a student may not read them.
Courses, rooms and classes. get_course adds the description, teachers,
member count and weekly timetable from /api/v1/courses. list_classes is new.
get_room reports what the account may do — allowedOperations is an object of
booleans, not the list it was typed as — and applicants and invitation links
where it may manage them.
Board and topic content. Link descriptions, image alt text, drawing and
video-conference titles, the ids behind external tools and H5P content (the
only thing resembling a quiz), and what a deleted element used to be. Topic
Etherpad pads are read like board pads, and htmlToText keeps table columns
apart and drops template indentation.
Files. A scan with no text layer falls back to the preview endpoint, whose
width and outputFormat are undocumented enums, so Claude gets a picture of
the page; list_files reports counts and sizes. Teams stay documented as
unreadable at any API version; their files come later.
What the crawl missed. Tasks attached to topics (18 of 60 on the live
account), each course's own file area, and — behind INDEX_PERSONAL_FILES —
personal files and submissions with their grade comments, so search and
what_changed cover grading. A submission hit points at get_task.
The local instance's preview profile gets an ImageMagick policy that allows
the coders its 7.1.2 build needs; the image's own denies them all.
110 tests.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
search now queries the Postgres index and states its freshness in every
result, with fresh=true bypassing it for a live crawl — the agent can
always get current data rather than being quietly misled by a stale
index. Adds refresh_index (per-course by default; a full crawl is ~270
requests), what_changed (generation diff — the API has no changed-since
filter of any kind), and index_status.
/api gives the CLI its backend behind the same bearer token as /mcp:
GET /manifest (cursor + per-file status), GET /files/:id (served from
the mirror with Range support, falling back to a live proxy for files
too large to mirror), GET /status, POST /refresh. Bytes go over plain
HTTP rather than MCP because base64 in JSON-RPC costs a third more and
buffers whole files. An unresolvable manifest cursor returns 409 rather
than silently meaning "everything is new", so a client cannot be tricked
into a full re-download.
Verified end to end against the live instance and a real Postgres:
crawl -> index -> German FTS -> manifest -> ranged download, with 401
on missing token, 400 on a malformed id, and 429 on a too-soon refresh.
Two findings worth recording. The build silently omitted the .sql
migrations from dist, which the store's graceful degradation turned into
"running without the index" rather than a crash — now copied by a build
step. And 3 of 4 sampled course PDFs have no embedded fonts at all: they
are scans, so extraction legitimately yields nothing. That is now
detected and reported as image-only with OCR named as the missing piece,
instead of an indistinguishable "0 characters". It revises the roadmap's
"OCR not needed" note, which held for reading images but not for
indexing them.
49 tests pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Moves the reusable half into src/core/ (client, types, board, extract,
text, keepalive) and the MCP half into src/mcp/. The layering was
already clean — nothing in core imported app code or read process.env —
so this is a move, not a redesign, and the smoke suite stayed the oracle
throughout.
The substantive part is core/crawl.ts. The course->board->card->element
->file traversal previously existed only inside tools/search.ts, and the
indexer, what's-new diff and file mirror all need it. It now returns a
typed Snapshot with breadcrumbs, sorted so two crawls of unchanged
content compare equal. Metadata only: downloading and extracting bytes
is an order of magnitude more expensive and only the indexer wants it.
core/match.ts holds the keyword matching, which makes it testable
without a network, and core/text.ts gains the fold/tokenize/snippet
helpers (accent folding is not optional for German).
search now finds strictly more than before — 5 hits vs 3 for
"Datenschutz" — because the snapshot surfaces file-name matches the old
streaming walk skipped. 34 unit tests and 30/30 smoke checks pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The JWT's exp claim says 30 days, and I took that as the session
lifetime. It is only an outer ceiling. The server also keeps a per-token
whitelist entry in Valkey (jwt:{accountId}:{jti}) whose TTL is
JWT_TIMEOUT_SECONDS — 7200s on this instance — and JwtStrategy.validate
re-sets it on every authenticated request. Two hours idle and the token
is rejected with 29 days still on exp.
Proven, not inferred: the token from yesterday returned 401 at 13.8h old.
The live instance publishes the values unauthenticated at
GET /api/v3/config/public — JWT_TIMEOUT_SECONDS 7200,
JWT_SHOW_TIMEOUT_WARNING_SECONDS 3600, the latter being exactly the
one-hour UI prompt that prompted this investigation.
refresh-session turns out not to be special: it extends through the same
guard as any other route, and uniquely only in returning the remaining
TTL. So the keepalive uses GET /api/v3/me instead, and the server stays
GET-only; the one POST in the repo is in scripts/probe.mjs, where it
reports the idle budget.
JWT_EXTENDED_TIMEOUT_SECONDS (~1 month) exists in the config schema but
is vestigial: privateDevice has no references in the current NestJS
source, and generateJwtAndAddToWhitelist never overrides the TTL.
Also fixes a real breakage this surfaced: TypeScript parameter
properties are rejected by Node's type stripping, so `npm run dev` and
`npm test` both failed on any file reaching them. Rewritten as explicit
fields, and noted in CLAUDE.md.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Read-only MCP server exposing a Schulcloud account to Claude: courses,
column boards, lessons, tasks, and file downloads with text extraction.
The API surface was verified against the live instance rather than
inferred from upstream source, which changed several design decisions:
- The `jwt` cookie works verbatim as `Authorization: Bearer` and lasts 30
days, so there is no cookie jar and no refresh-session timer.
- Course contents live at /api/v3/course-rooms/{courseId}/board; there is
no GET /api/v3/courses/{id}.
- Files are a separate service (/api/v3/file/*) with its own OpenAPI doc.
- Board file elements carry no file id; attachments are resolved by
listing files-storage with parentType=boardnodes and the element id.
Read-only by construction: every client method is a GET, including the
api_get escape hatch. The endpoint is internet-facing by necessity, so a
leaked token being unable to act as the user is the key safety property.
Deploys as a container behind the Pi's existing Caddy, guarded by a
constant-time bearer check. Stateless — no database.
Verified: 28 unit tests, plus a 30-check end-to-end run driving a real
MCP client over Streamable HTTP against the live account.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
