Apple Contacts

@mgcrea/mcp-apple-contacts

Model Context Protocol server for the macOS Apple Contacts address book.

Unofficial. Not affiliated with Apple. It reads the address book already on your Mac.

Why it exists: resolving handles

apple_contacts_resolve_handles turns phone numbers and email addresses into names, in batches of up to 500. Everything else here is in service of that.

This is the surface where the file-lane rule is about capability, not speed. Contacts' scripting dictionary answers in ~65 ms — comfortably fast, and still useless for this: resolving a phone number means a suffix-keyed index over every stored number, and no quantity of Apple Events round trips produces one. So reads go through read-only SQLite, and there is no Apple Events read lane.

The lookup builds in 3 ms over 947 phone keys and 295 email keys, then is kept for the life of the process.

Permissions — this one is different

Permission	Needed for	Notes
Contacts (its own)	reads	prompts — answer the dialog, and that's it
Automation → Contacts	writes only	reads are unaffected

Contacts fails differently from every other surface in this family: it sits behind its own TCC service rather than behind Full Disk Access, and unlike Full Disk Access that permission prompts. So the fix is usually "answer the dialog", not "go to System Settings" — and nothing here asks you to hand over whole-disk access for an address book.

Tools

Read: diagnostics, resolve_handles, search_contacts, list_contacts, get_contact.

Write, registered only when APPLE_CONTACTS_ALLOW_WRITES=1 — with the flag off they are invisible to the model, not merely refused: create_contact, update_contact.

resolveHandles() is also exported from the package root, for callers already inside Node that would rather not go through MCP to reach it.

Configuration

Variable	Default
APPLE_CONTACTS_ALLOW_WRITES	off	Register the mutating tools.
APPLE_CONTACTS_PHONE_SUFFIX_DIGITS	9	Suffix key length; 6–15.
APPLE_CONTACTS_INDEX_MODE	auto	auto | ro | immutable | off.
APPLE_CONTACTS_STORE	auto	Explicit store path.
APPLE_CONTACTS_OSASCRIPT_TIMEOUT_MS	30000	Sized for the first-run permission prompt.

Notes that will bite you

• The store is plural. locate.ts returns a list and every query fans out — on a real machine, stores=2/2, contacts=421, matching Apple Events exactly. A server reading only the first store silently loses an account.
• Nine-digit suffix keys, and the length travels inside the lookup object so the index and the query cannot diverge. A self-join over a real address book at 7, 9 and 10 digits settles it: 7 and 9 collide identically (10 of 947 keys, 1.1%), and 10 drops a key while losing the national-to-E.164 join.
• Ambiguity is a status, never a guess — resolved / unknown / ambiguous / shortcode. unknown is documented in the tool description as expected, not as an error.
• Z_ENT filters to ABCDContact. Without it, a list tool returns your groups as people.
• A write can succeed and still not persist. Contacts holds changes in an unsaved buffer, so a mutation can read back correctly inside the same script and never reach the store. Every write script saves and then re-reads.

Licence

MIT.