Morocco communes

An open dataset and HTTP API for Morocco's administrative divisions: 12 régions, 75 provinces and préfectures, 8 préfectures d'arrondissements, 213 cercles, 1,503 communes and 41 arrondissements, with official HCP geographic codes, names in French and Arabic, 2024 and 2014 population, HCP's census figures on age, education, languages, work and housing from both years, the 2024 count of economic establishments, and boundaries from OpenStreetMap.

HCP publishes the census as spreadsheets. This builds a dataset, an API and a site from them and from OpenStreetMap, and shows the working.

The dataset

data/v1/ is committed and versioned, so you can use it without the API at all. CHANGELOG.md says what each version added; the build refuses a version with no entry in it.

| Directory | Holds | Licence | |---|---|---| | attributes/ | every unit, JSON and CSV | HCP, on CC BY 4.0 terms | | geometry/ | one TopoJSON per région, and which communes border which | ODbL, share-alike | | indicators/ | the census indicators for every unit, 2024 and 2014, JSON and CSV | HCP, on CC BY 4.0 terms | | economy/ | the 2024 count of economic establishments for every unit, JSON and CSV | HCP, on CC BY 4.0 terms | | housing/ | the 2024 urban housing stock, by dwelling, JSON and CSV | HCP, on CC BY 4.0 terms | | crosswalk/ | the 2014 ↔ 2024 reconciliation | HCP, on CC BY 4.0 terms | | insights/ | possible reasons for the 2024 figures that stand out, each resting on a checked census fact, JSON | the text this repository's own; the figures HCP, on CC BY 4.0 terms | | sources.json | each source's digest, licence and vintage | |

The licences differ by directory and geometry/ carries its own LICENSE. Five fields on each commune (centroid, bbox, osm, areaKm2 and density) come from OpenStreetMap and are ODbL too; provenance.geometry marks them. Every level has a CSV that opens cleanly in Excel, Arabic included.

Rebuild it with pnpm dataset:build. From the same cache the output is byte-identical.

pnpm build also writes the boundaries as GeoJSON from the TopoJSON above: each commune, and each province and région outlined from its communes. They're served beside it rather than committed.

The API

Three tiers, and which one served a response is in its X-Api-Tier header.

Pre-rendered. 11,629 files written at build time and served straight from Cloudflare Pages, without running any code. Free and unmetered.

GET /api/regions.json                        GET /api/regions/01.json
GET /api/regions/01/provinces.json           GET /api/regions/01/communes/page/1.json
GET /api/provinces/01.511.json               GET /api/provinces/01.511/cercles.json
GET /api/cercles/01.511.05.json              GET /api/communes/01.511.01.0.json
GET /api/communes/page/1.json                GET /api/communes/type/urban/page/1.json
GET /api/communes/01.511.01.0/arrondissements.json
GET /api/communes/09.581.01.07/neighbours.json
GET /api/communes/01.511.01.0/indicators.json
GET /api/communes/09.581.01.07/economy.json
GET /api/arrondissements/01.511.01.05.json   GET /api/indicators.json
GET /api/economy.json                        GET /api/version.json
GET /data/v1/**

Alias. The query-string and extensionless shapes. A path-keyed asset store can't match on a query string, so the Worker resolves these to the file that already holds the answer and names it in Content-Location:

GET /api/communes?province=01.511&page=1     GET /api/communes?type=urban
GET /api/communes/tanger                     GET /api/communes/001511010
GET /api/communes/tanger/indicators          GET /api/communes/tiznit/economy

Computed. The answers no file holds:

GET /api/search?q=tanger&levels=commune&limit=10
GET /api/communes/near?lat=33.5731&lng=-7.5898&radius=15
GET /api/communes/at?lat=35.786&lng=-5.8125
GET /api/communes?province=01.511&type=urban
GET /api/communes?sort=-population&min_population=100000
GET /api/communes?region=01&sort=-labour.unemploymentRate
GET /api/communes?sort=-economy.establishments.jobs

A list sorts by any of the census indicators, by its path, and each commune it lists then carries the figure it was sorted by. 2014. before the path sorts by the 2014 figure and change. by how far a commune moved between the censuses. An establishment count goes under economy..

Search takes French, Arabic, a slug or a code. It folds the alef variants, ta-marbuta and alef maqsura the names actually carry, and the tatweel and vowel marks they never do but people type anyway. It matches names spelt another way by their consonants, so titwan finds Tétouan and jdida El Jadida. 01.511.01.0, 001511010, 1511010 and tanger all address one commune, and 18 exonyms are listed by hand because no amount of character folding gets from Fez to Fès or from Port Lyautey to Kénitra.

What's counted. The alias and computed routes and the MCP server count their own use in Workers Analytics Engine: the route with its codes taken out, or an MCP message's tool when it called one and its method otherwise, the name an MCP client gives itself, the first word of the User-Agent, the country, the status and how long it took. Pre-rendered files run no code, so they aren't counted. pnpm stats reads it back, with the npm, PyPI and GitHub numbers.

A second store, in D1, counts 5 kinds of row: a search, a place opened, a tool an assistant calls, the name an MCP client gives itself, and a file downloaded. An assistant connecting through the MCP server is counted by the name it gives itself, and each tool it calls by the tool's name and the place it asks about. A row is a day and a handful of categories, and no row holds a key, a cookie or an address that ties it to another. pnpm demand reads it back; the site's /docs/privacy/ page says exactly what's kept.

pnpm deploy:live switches it on. It applies the migration to the live database, builds the site with the most looked-up page read from that database, deploys it, then deploys the nightly rollup Worker. A plain pnpm build doesn't query the database and leaves that page empty. A failed write is swallowed, so pnpm demand a day after the first deploy is how to see rows are arriving.

Every response is enveloped with data, meta and links. Errors are RFC 9457 problem documents, and a well-formed code that names nothing is a 404 while something unsearchable is a 400. CORS is open.

Full reference: api/README.md.

For programs and agents

• /api/openapi.json: an OpenAPI 3.1 description of every route, built from the same module the Worker reads its limits from, so the defaults and bounds it states are the ones enforced. Most agent frameworks turn it into tools directly.
• /llms.txt: a short markdown map of the API and the dataset, in the llmstxt.org shape, for an LLM reading the site.
• /mcp: an MCP server with 10 read-only tools (search, get_commune, get_unit, communes_near, commune_at, list_communes, get_indicators, get_economy, get_housing, get_insights), so Claude, Claude Code and other MCP clients can query the data directly, census figures included. The site's /docs/mcp/ page has the setup for each client.

In a form, or offline

• /components/commune-picker.js: a custom element that fills a région, a province and a commune <select> from the static files, so a form posts the commune's HCP code. It's served with open CORS, and /docs/components/ has a React version beside it.
• morocco-communes: the dataset as an npm package, in packages/morocco-communes/. Codes, names, parents and population as ES modules with types, one per level, and without the OpenStreetMap fields, so it carries no ODbL terms. pnpm npm:build builds it from data/v1, and the package takes the dataset's version number.
• morocco-communes on PyPI: the same dataset for analysts, in packages/morocco-communes-py/. The units, both censuses, the establishments and the crosswalk, each table a pandas DataFrame, or a list of dicts with as_frame=False, which needs nothing but the standard library. pnpm py:build builds its data from data/v1, gzipped, and it takes the dataset's version too.

The docs site

site/ is an Astro site in English and French, with a light and dark theme and a control to pick either or follow the system. It builds to static HTML: the home page, 7 docs pages (the API reference, the MCP setup, the components, the npm package, the Python package, the census figures and a glossary), and a page for every région, province and commune, 3,216 pages in all.

The home page opens on a map of every commune, shaded by density, change since 2014, or urban and rural. Hovering one shows its figures and clicking opens its page. A commune's page has its figures and rank, a map of its province, the communes it borders, where its change sits among all of them, and its census figures: an age pyramid of men and women, headline rates beside the women's and the country's, and the languages its people use. A list of every commune filters as you type, in French or Arabic.

Its JavaScript is the map's hover and switch, the list's filter, the playground (a Solid island that queries whatever API it's deployed beside and shows the X-Api-Tier of each response), the picker on the components page, and the copy buttons.

Everything on it that describes the data or the API is generated at build time, by the scripts under site/scripts/:

• map.ts draws the home map from the TopoJSON the API serves. Each shared border is one arc, simplified once for both of its communes, so the fills meet without slivers. Its colours were checked for contrast and colour-blind separation in both themes.

• hierarchy.ts builds the code ladder, a real chain from région down to arrondissement.

• charts.ts computes population change per région, the distribution of commune sizes, how little land half the population lives on, how many communes lost people, and the growth spread of the 207 crosswalked communes against the 1,286 whose code never changed. That last one is the reconciliation checking itself: the two distributions sit almost on top of each other.

• downloads.ts lists the files under data/v1 with their real sizes, and fails the build on a file that isn't there.

• reference.ts builds the API reference from buildOpenApi, with each example a real response from the emitted files or the Worker's own functions, and lists the MCP tools by connecting a client to the server. The French page reads a translation of each line of the spec, and the build fails when one is missing or left over.

The région, province and commune pages are built from site/src/lib/places.ts, which reads data/v1 once per build: ranks, the communes each one borders, matched on shared boundary points, and small maps drawn the same way as the home map.

The charts are inline SVG and CSS, so they need no JavaScript and no charting library.

Arabic names are in the data and Arabic queries work; the interface is English and French.

It's static because nothing in it needs a server, so the hand-written Worker stays the only Worker and the pages cost nothing to serve.

Running it

pnpm install
pnpm dataset:build     # rebuilds data/v1 from the cached sources
pnpm build             # the docs site, then the API tree, into dist/
pnpm api:dev           # wrangler pages dev on :8788, serving the site and the API together
pnpm api:smoke         # probes a running deployment
pnpm check             # typecheck both trees, then the tests
pnpm eval              # asks a model 49 questions through the MCP server; see evals/

A deploy build takes the origin it will be served from, which the canonical URLs, the link preview image, the sitemap and the MCP page's configuration snippets are all built