mcp-server-starter

Skeleton for building a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server in Python. Fork this when you need to expose a custom set of tools/data to Claude Desktop, Claude Code, or any MCP-compatible client.

What's an MCP server?

MCP is an open protocol that lets language-model clients call into external tools and data sources through a standard interface. An MCP server is the small process that hosts those tools — you write the functions, the protocol handles discovery and invocation.

Related MCP server: Test MCP Server

Quickstart

Install directly from this repository with pipx:

pipx install git+https://github.com/roderickch01/mcp-server-starter.git

Then register it with your MCP client. For Claude Desktop, edit ~/.config/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json (Linux), ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json (macOS), or %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json (Windows) and add:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "starter": {
      "command": "mcp-server-starter"
    }
  }
}

A copy of this snippet lives at examples/claude_desktop_config.json. Restart your client and the echo and add tools should appear.

What's included

Two demo tools to verify the wiring:

• echo(text: str) -> str — returns "echo: {text}"

• add(a: int, b: int) -> int — returns the sum

Both live in src/mcp_server_starter/server.py (under 30 lines).

Adding your own tool

Open server.py and decorate any function with @mcp.tool(). The signature, type hints, and docstring become the tool's schema automatically:

@mcp.tool()
def reverse(text: str) -> str:
    """Return the input string reversed."""
    return text[::-1]

Reinstall (pipx reinstall mcp-server-starter) and restart your MCP client. The new tool is discoverable.

Local development

git clone https://github.com/roderickch01/mcp-server-starter.git
cd mcp-server-starter
python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .
mcp-server-starter   # runs the server over stdio

License

MIT — see LICENSE.