fli: Search Google Flights from Python, CLI, and MCP

Overview

Fli is a Python library, CLI, and MCP server for programmatic access to Google Flights. Rather than scraping rendered HTML or automating a browser, it sends a request to Google Flights' public search page and extracts results from the page's inline data. A TypeScript port, fli-js, provides a parallel API.

It is aimed at developers and AI assistant users who want flight search in scripts, terminal workflows, or MCP-compatible clients. It supports searches for specific travel dates and flexible date ranges, with filters for cabin, stops, airlines, alliances, and passengers.

Key Features

• Search one-way and round-trip flights, and find prices across a flexible date range.
• Filter results by cabin class, stops, departure window, airline, alliance, and layover bounds.
• Set passenger counts, currency, language, and country for searches.
• Use the fli CLI, Python API, or MCP server over STDIO or streamable HTTP.
• Use fli-js, the TypeScript port, for a corresponding JavaScript or TypeScript API.
• Apply result sorting, retries, rate limiting, input validation, and error handling.

Use Cases

• A developer can add Google Flights results to a Python script or application without writing page parsing code.
• A traveler can compare routes and dates from the terminal, including airline, stop, and cabin preferences.
• An MCP client user can request flight searches conversationally through an assistant such as Claude Desktop.
• A team using TypeScript can build flight-search workflows with the fli-js package and the same search-page transport.

Getting Started

Install the Python package and try the CLI:

pipx install flights
fli --help

For MCP use, install the same package and run fli-mcp. See the README for setup, options, and API examples.

Considerations

• The project is active, with regular commits and releases, and has contributions from 29 people; contributor activity is not concentrated on one person. Recent issue closures and merged pull requests indicate ongoing maintenance, though the reported median issue close time is about ten weeks.
• The transport reads results from Google's public search page. Multi-city searches are unsupported through the library search API, booking-option lookup is unavailable, and three filters are dropped with a warning.
• A page search returns fewer itineraries than the former RPC-based approach. Results can be especially sparse for children and infants, and date-range searches fetch each date individually, with a maximum range of 93 dates.
• Google may return a page without result data or present a consent interstitial in some regions. The README documents retries and the FLI_SOCS_COOKIE setting; corporate TLS-intercepting proxies may require a configured CA bundle.
• The Python package requires Python 3.10 or later. The repository also documents Docker-based development and CI, but end users can start with the package installation above.