Skip to main content
Glama
colab-mcp

colab-mcp

Official
by googlecolab

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.

Loading tool schema changelog…

    TDQS

    A3.5/5.0

    Scored across 1 tool

    Disambiguation5/5

    Only one tool exists, so there is no risk of confusion or overlap with other tools.

    Naming Consistency5/5

    The single tool name follows a clear verb_noun pattern ('open_colab_browser_connection'), so consistency is not an issue.

    Tool Count2/5

    A single tool is too few for a server intended to enable Colab notebook editing; the tool merely opens a connection, suggesting many necessary actions are missing.

    Completeness1/5

    The tool set is severely incomplete: it only provides a connection opener and lacks any tools for actual notebook editing, despite claiming to unlock such tools.

    Maintenance

    ActivityInactive
    ResponsivenessMostly unanswered

    Related MCP Connectors

    Related MCP Servers