Show HN: O'Reilly Book Parody Generator MCP Server

4 months ago 4

An MCP (Model Context Protocol) server for generating O'RLY? (O'Reilly parody) book covers that display directly in Claude Desktop application.

simply add the following to your mcp configuration:

// ... other MCP servers ... "mcp-orly": { "command": "uvx", "args": [ "orly-mcp@latest" ] } // ... other MCP servers ...

# Clone the repository git clone [your-repo-url] cd orly-mcp # Create a virtual environment and install dependencies uv venv .venv uv pip install -r requirements.txt # Test a sample image generation uv run python test_mcp.py # Run comprehensive tests uv run python test_comprehensive.py # Start the MCP server for development python start_server.py

Claude Desktop Configuration

Add this MCP server to your Claude Desktop configuration file (claude_desktop_config.json):

Recommended Configuration

{ "mcpServers": { "orly-local": { "command": "uv", "args": [ "run", "--with", "fastmcp", "--with", "pillow", "--with", "fonttools", "--with", "requests", "python", "/path/to/your/orly-mcp/orly_mcp/server.py" ], "cwd": "/path/to/your/orly-mcp" } } }

Important: Replace /path/to/your/orly-mcp with your actual project path.

Alternative: Package Installation

# Install in editable mode uv pip install -e . # Claude Desktop config { "mcpServers": { "orly-local": { "command": "uvx", "args": ["--from", "/your/path/to/orly-mcp", "orly-mcp"] } } }

"ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'mcp'" Error

If you see this error, the MCP dependencies aren't available:

cd /path/to/your/orly-mcp uv pip install -r requirements.txt

Make sure your Claude Desktop configuration includes all required dependencies with --with flags.

"ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'fontTools'" Error

Ensure all dependencies are specified in your Claude Desktop configuration:

"args": [ "run", "--with", "fastmcp", "--with", "pillow", "--with", "fonttools", "--with", "requests", "python", "/your/path/to/orly_mcp/server.py" ]

Run the comprehensive test to verify everything works:

uv run python test_comprehensive.py

Using the ORLY Tool in Claude

Once configured, you can ask Claude to generate O'RLY book covers like this:

"Create an O'RLY book cover with the title 'Advanced Debugging' and author 'Jane Developer'"
"Generate a book cover titled 'Machine Learning Mistakes' with subtitle 'What Could Go Wrong?' by 'AI Enthusiast'"
"Make an O'RLY cover for 'CSS Grid Mastery' with theme 7 and image 15"

✨ The generated book cover images will be displayed directly in the chat!

The tool supports these parameters:

title (required): Main book title
subtitle (optional): Text at the top of the cover
author (optional): Author name (bottom right)
image_code (optional): Animal/object image 1-40 (random if not specified)
theme (optional): Color theme 0-16 (random if not specified)
guide_text_placement (optional): Position of guide text - 'top_left', 'top_right', 'bottom_left', 'bottom_right'
guide_text (optional): Custom guide text (defaults to "The Definitive Guide")

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.txt file for details.

The original O'RLY book cover generation code in the orly_generator/ directory is based on work by Charles Berlin (2016) and is also licensed under the MIT License - see orly_generator/LICENSE.txt for details.

This project builds upon the excellent work by Charles Berlin. The core image generation code in the orly_generator/ directory is adapted from his original orly-mcp repository, updated to work with Python 3 and integrated into an MCP server for Claude Desktop.

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