Apple Wallet MCP

I love driving, so much so that I'd done a whole trip to Kazakhstan 🇰🇿 just to drive in the open plains. I loved the cheap gas, I loved the wide open landscapes, and I loved pretending that my 2021 rental Hyundai CUV was actually an 1821 Khanate horse.

I also loved that Bombay airport's parking, for my KZ trip, was the cost of a roundtrip uber, which meant I had another excuse to drive to the airport.

Fast forward a couple of weeks, and I'm flying again, criss crossing the country for few more weeks. I 'packed' my suitcase in 10 minutes, got ready to leave, and decided to pay for airport parking ahead of time.

It was now the cost of 4 ubers, or one criss of the country.

Anyway, I love ubers. They are so convenient. I booked one, and a tiny hatchback with its bumper hanging off showed up.

Next up was figuring out how I'd get into the airport. I'd obviously checked in but where was my boarding pass anyway?

I did not bring my personal laptop on this trip, and the spacious uber couldn't accommodate using such a thing anyway. Sure, maybe the airline has a mobile app that maybe doesn't require signing in, and maybe gives you a plane apple wallet pass you could just add to your phone, maybe.

So I just did the easy thing and asked claude (claude -rc | Remote control) running on my VPS to please go look at my email, see if a boarding pass, in any format was sent, and just give me an apple wallet pass I could add.

...

There is an email from the airline! It has the boarding pass PDF!

...

It is formatted awfully, and I'd prefer running straight through airport security over the embarrassment of trying to use it on my phone, zooming in, fiddling with brightness etc. etc.

What about that apple wallet pass, why can't Claude just make one off the PDF?

Apple

You can't have a .pkpass file without creating atleast:

wallet_signing
   ├── AppleWWDRCAG4.cer
   ├── pass.cer
   ├── pass.csr
   ├── pass.p12
   ├── pass.pem
   └── passkey.pem

What are these and where do I get them?

Certificates, basically an Apple stamp letting your phone accept passes it will actually add to the Apple Wallet app.

Apple will let you create your own stamp if you have a $100/yr developer account, using developer.apple.com, which I luckily had for the first year ever.

Hunting and Gathering

AppleWWDRCAG4.cer was a straight download link for a cert, so Claude could just get it.

Getting pass.cer required a chain of files, first of which Claude just generated and let me download to my phone. I uploaded it to a form, filled it out, got another file, then filled another form and finally got a link to download the certificate.

Except, iOS Safari can't download *.cer files without wanting to install them. And I can't just give the download link to Claude because it requires auth, which Claude's browser instance would not have.

After doing a bit of searching, I discovered why Chrome holds 90% of the browser pie, and also that it lets me download *.cer files.

I finally had all the pieces together and gave the *.cer file to Claude to please just send me the boarding pass.

Magic

I received a notif, checked my email, and had an actual apple wallet pass. It felt like magic.

Putting on some curtains

The final product was great, but I did not like the ordeal I had to go through to assemble ingredients.

I had obviously searched up pass creators online at some point but they were all either:

• web/mobile apps, which would give you a pass but you had to interact with the UI. OR
• 'Skills' I could pay for download. Imagine downloading instructions.

So after my flight landed and a few days had passed I decided to launch a simple MCP server to let people create their own passes, without so much of the pain and a lot more of the magic.

Wallet MCP Pass

I published walletmcppass.com. It's free to use, and does not require an API key.

It exposes a single MCP tool, create_wallet_pass, over streamable-HTTP at https://walletmcppass.com/mcp. Your agent can give it pass fields (style, fields, barcode message, optional icon/logo images) and it returns a signed, ready-to-install .pkpass file.

It does not require an Apple Developer signing certificate required on the caller's side, and supports all five Wallet pass styles: boardingPass|eventTicket|coupon|storeCard|generic.

Parts of the source code are also open source, and available at github.com/arshwaraich/wallet-mcp.