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Colab-mcp

An MCP server for bridging your local agent to a Colab session in the browser.

Supported Clients

This MCP server requires client support for notifications/tools/list_changed and for the client to be running locally on your device.

Popular clients that fit these criteria include:

  • Gemini CLI

  • Claude Code

  • Windsurf

Setup

  • Install uv (pip install uv)

  • Configure for usage (eg for mcp.json style services):

...
  "mcpServers": {
    "colab-mcp": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["git+https://github.com/googlecolab/colab-mcp"],
      "timeout": 30000
    }
  }
...

(If you have a non-standard default package index (Googlers), you may also need to add --index https://pypi.org/simple)

Issues & Discussions

We are using GitHub discussions as the place for issue discussion and feature requests. As discussions mature into action items, we will add those items as issues. This helps us ensure that issues in the issue tracker are well-understood, deduplicated, and actionable. For these reasons, please do NOT open issues directly.

Contributing

We unfortunately don't have the bandwidth to support review of external contributions, and we don't want user PRs to languish, so we aren't accepting any external contributions right now.

If you have a great idea or pain point, we would love to hear about it on our discussions page - the preferred place for issue discussion and feature requests.

Internal - For Colab Developers

Prerequisites

  • uv is required (pip install uv)

  • Configure git hooks to run repo presubmits

git config core.hooksPath .githooks

Gemini CLI setup

...
  "mcpServers": {
    "colab-mcp": {
      "command": "uv",
      "args": ["run", "colab-mcp"],
      "cwd": "/path/to/github/colab-mcp",
      "timeout": 30000
    }
  }
...

Available Tools

1 tool
open_colab_browser_connectionA

Opens a connection to a Google Colab browser session and unlocks notebook editing tools. Returns a boolean representing whether the connection attempt succeeded

Inputs: no named parameters. Returns: result

Tool Schema Changelog

Recent tool additions, removals, and schema changes observed during successful MCP inspections.

    TDQS

    A3.8/5.0

    Scored across 1 tool

    Disambiguation5/5

    Only one tool exists, so there is no possibility of confusion between tools. The purpose is clearly stated as opening a Colab browser connection.

    Naming Consistency5/5

    The single tool name follows a clear snake_case pattern with a verb and object (open_colab_browser_connection). There is no inconsistency since only one name exists.

    Tool Count2/5

    A single tool is too few for a Colab integration server. The description references 'unlocking notebook editing tools' but none are actually provided, making the tool count inappropriate for the apparent scope.

    Completeness1/5

    The server only offers a connection opener, with no actual editing or interaction tools. The functionality implied by 'unlocking notebook editing tools' is completely absent, leaving the surface severely incomplete.

    Maintenance

    ActivityInactive
    ResponsivenessNo recent community issues

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