INDI MCP Server

An MCP server that controls astrophotography equipment via INDI on a Raspberry Pi (or equivalent device), and exposes it to other computers on the local network.

What it does

• Equipment control — connect to an INDI server and control mounts, cameras, filter wheels, focusers and other astrophotography gear through MCP tools.

• INDI server management — manage the INDI server itself: install/remove drivers, and start, stop or restart the server, all via MCP.

• Frame storage — captured frames are stored on the Raspberry Pi and can be listed, inspected and transferred to another computer on the local network via MCP.

Related MCP server: mcp-server-ascom

Documentation

• Design Document

• Deployment — running the server locally (stdio) vs. as a systemd service on the Raspberry Pi (streamable-http)

• Rig YAML Schema — field reference for rigs/*.yaml imaging rig definitions

• Observatory Location YAML Schema — field reference for observatories/*.yaml location definitions

• Script YAML Schema — field reference for the YAML scripting layer; built-in primitive/composed scripts ship under scripts/

• Property/Message JSON Payload Schema — field reference for the kind/type-tagged JSON carried inside MCP tool results and event streams

Debug CLI

indi-mcp-cli is a small standalone tool for manually testing/debugging the INDI server and driver management tools, without needing an MCP client:

uv run indi-mcp-cli server status
uv run indi-mcp-cli server start --port 7624
uv run indi-mcp-cli driver list
uv run indi-mcp-cli driver start "CCD Simulator"
uv run indi-mcp-cli listen --device "CCD Simulator"   # prints incoming events until Ctrl+C

The driver subcommands read the driver catalog from /usr/share/indi/ by default, which only exists where INDI's drivers are actually installed (e.g. the Raspberry Pi). On a machine with a local INDI install elsewhere (e.g. Homebrew on macOS, typically /usr/local/share/indi), point indiweb at it via the INDI_DATA_DIR env var:

export INDI_DATA_DIR=/usr/local/share/indi
uv run indi-mcp-cli driver list

Status

Early setup stage — MCP server skeleton in place, with INDI server management tools (start/stop/restart/status) implemented.

Tech stack

• Python 3.12+, managed with uv

• Official Python MCP SDK (mcp)

• indipyclient — pure-Python INDI client, used for equipment control

• indiweb — used as a library only (its IndiServer/DriverCollection classes), for indiserver process/FIFO control and driver-catalog parsing; its bundled web app is not used

• astropy — celestial-geometry computation (Sun/Moon position, illumination) for capture_frame's FITS header enrichment, see docs/FitsHeaders.md

• Ruff for linting and formatting

• ty for static type checking

• pytest, with pytest-asyncio and pytest-cov

• pre-commit to run the above on every commit

Development setup

uv sync --dev
uv run pre-commit install

Common tasks:

uv run ruff check .          # lint
uv run ruff format .         # format
uv run ty check .            # type-check
uv run pytest --cov          # test

Contributing / branching model

This project follows a git-flow-style workflow:

• main — always releasable; only accepts merges from release/* or hotfix/* branches.

• develop — integration branch for ongoing work.

• feature/* — branched from and merged back into develop.

A CI check (enforce-merge-policy) rejects pull requests that don't follow these rules.