Google Calendar MCP setup (dedicated account, ad-hoc event sharing)

Status: done (2026-07-13). Account, project, MCP server, and auth are live. 33 events from porto-chapter-calendar.html pushed as a one-off — no automatic sync yet (tracked as a roadmap item in Notes and ideas _jul26.md).

• Account: wifitribe.porto.jul26@gmail.com
• Project id: wifitribe-porto-jul26
• OAuth credentials: ~/.config/google-calendar-mcp/credentials.json (outside repo)
• OAuth token: ~/.config/google-calendar-mcp/tokens.json (outside repo)
• Claude Code MCP server: google-calendar (user scope, in ~/.claude.json, not the repo)

Context

Give Claude Code write access to a new, dedicated Google Calendar so it can create/update events on request, and let site visitors subscribe to that calendar’s public feed. This is separate from porto-chapter-calendar.html’s existing client-side .ics download links (no sync between the two — confirmed ad-hoc only).

Two MCP options were compared:

• Google’s official remote MCP (calendarmcp.googleapis.com) — Developer Preview, remote/hosted, requires Claude.ai custom-connector support (Pro/Team/Enterprise plan). Doesn’t apply to local stdio servers.
• nspady/google-calendar-mcp (community, local stdio) — chosen. Full read/write, works with plain personal Gmail, OAuth “Desktop app” client (loopback redirect, no public URI needed), no Claude plan gating, runs via npx under Claude Code’s own MCP config.

Public subscription is unrelated to either MCP — it’s a one-time Google Calendar sharing setting that produces a public iCal/webcal URL.

Steps taken

1. New Google account — done

wifitribe.porto.jul26@gmail.com.

2. Public subscription link — done

Calendar → Settings → Access permissions → “Make available to public”. Subscribe URL format (grab the exact one from Settings → Integrate calendar → Secret/public address in iCal format if not already saved elsewhere):

https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/wifitribe.porto.jul26%40gmail.com/public/basic.ics

3. GCP project + OAuth client — done, project id wifitribe-porto-jul26

1. Project wifitribe-porto-jul26 created under the new account.
2. Google Calendar API enabled via Console UI (no gcloud CLI available locally).
3. OAuth consent screen: External audience, scope https://www.googleapis.com/auth/calendar.
4. OAuth client: Desktop app type, client JSON downloaded.

Gotcha hit: first auth attempt failed with Error 403: access_denied — consent screen was still in “Testing” publishing status, which blocks even the project owner unless explicitly whitelisted. Fix: Console → Audience → Test users → add wifitribe.porto.jul26@gmail.com → retry.

4. Install & configure nspady/google-calendar-mcp — done

• Registered at user scope (claude mcp add google-calendar -s user -e GOOGLE_OAUTH_CREDENTIALS=... -- npx -y @cocal/google-calendar-mcp) — lives in ~/.claude.json, not the repo.
• Client JSON initially got saved inside the repo by accident (Porto Chapter Calendar/integrations/) — caught before commit, moved to ~/.config/google-calendar-mcp/credentials.json. Always verify credential files land outside the repo before anything gets staged, especially on a public GitHub Pages repo.
• First-time auth (npx @cocal/google-calendar-mcp auth) run after adding the test user; token saved to ~/.config/google-calendar-mcp/tokens.json.

5. Verified

• list-calendars confirmed the right account/primary calendar.
• Test event created and deleted successfully.
• 33 dated events from EVENTS/SPANS in porto-chapter-calendar.html bulk-created via create-events (2026-07-13). 2 cancelled:true events (brunch, kayak) and 3 undated FLOATING ideas (tiles, ferrata, ss-seo) skipped by design, along with recurring HOUSEKEEPING entries. Missing end-times were filled with defaults (1h for len:"short", 1.5h for len:"part", 2h for MATCH watch-parties, full-day for date-only entries) since the source data doesn’t specify them — worth a skim against the public feed.

Explicitly not done

• No automatic sync between porto-chapter-calendar.html’s EVENTS/SPANS arrays and the Google Calendar — the push above was a manual one-off. Tracked as an open roadmap item in Notes and ideas _jul26.md (“Make the Google Calendar push part of the regular update workflow”).
• No repo files touched by the MCP config or credentials (kept out of git).