metaeditor5-mcp

MCP server that lets an AI author MQL5 Expert Advisors/indicators/scripts, compile them with MetaEditor's CLI, and backtest them with MetaTrader 5's Strategy Tester — without a human driving the MetaEditor/MetaTrader GUI.

What this does and doesn't do

• Does: write/read/list/delete .mq5/.mqh/.mqproj/.set files under the MetaTrader data folder's MQL5 tree, compile them via MetaEditor64.exe /compile, and run them through the Strategy Tester via terminal64.exe /config for historical backtesting.

• Doesn't: attach an EA to a live/demo chart or place any real order. Backtesting is a closed historical simulation with no live connection. Deploying an EA to actually trade is a manual step in the MetaTrader terminal GUI, and this project intentionally does not automate it.

• Doesn't: accept arbitrary/absolute filesystem paths. Every path-taking tool only accepts paths relative to the MQL5 sandbox root (Experts, Include, Indicators, Scripts, Libraries, Files), validated to reject .. traversal and anything resolving outside it.

Related MCP server: Filesystem MCP Server

Requirements

• Windows. MetaEditor/MetaTrader 5 desktop only ships for Windows, and this server shells out to MetaEditor64.exe/terminal64.exe directly, so it only runs on Windows (including inside a Windows VM) — not macOS/Linux, even if MT5 is run there under Wine.

• MetaTrader 5 installed (which includes MetaEditor). Any broker's installer works — the server doesn't hardcode any broker.

• Node.js 18+.

Setup

git clone https://github.com/dchumari/metaeditor5-mcp.git
cd metaeditor5-mcp
npm install
npm run build

Add to Claude Code's MCP config (.mcp.json), replacing the path below with the absolute path to wherever you cloned this repo:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "metaeditor5": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["C:\\path\\to\\metaeditor5-mcp\\dist\\index.js"]
    }
  }
}

The server auto-detects your MetaTrader 5 installation and its data folder by scanning %APPDATA%\MetaQuotes\Terminal\*\origin.txt. If you have more than one installation, set MCP_MT5_INSTALL_DIR to the one you want (e.g. C:\Program Files\MetaTrader 5), or pass installDirHint to the get_environment_info tool.

Backtesting requires an account login

Verified empirically: MetaTrader's Strategy Tester refuses to start with no account specified ("tester not started because the account is not specified"), even for a pure historical simulation. To use run_backtest, log into any demo or live account in the MetaTrader 5 terminal (File → Login to Trade Account, or open a new demo account) with "Save my login details" checked.

That's normally the only setup step needed: run_backtest resolves the login to use, in order, from (1) the login argument, (2) the MCP_MT5_LOGIN environment variable, (3) the account number MetaTrader already has saved as its current login (read from config/common.ini's Login= key — verified working end-to-end). Set MCP_MT5_LOGIN explicitly only if you have multiple saved accounts and the terminal's current one isn't the one you want used. The account's password is never read, stored, or passed by this server — it relies entirely on MetaTrader's own saved/remembered credentials for that login. Never pass a password through an MCP tool call.

First backtest for a new symbol/date range may need a retry. Verified on a fresh demo account: the Strategy Tester downloads missing history from the broker in the background, but its own internal timeout for that (~18s) can be shorter than one authentication round-trip on a fresh connection, causing the first attempt to fail with "no history data" even though the download is actually still happening (visible as growing .hcc files under bases/<server>/history/<symbol>/). Simply calling run_backtest again against the same symbol/range once it's downloaded resolves it.

Environment variables

Tools

Development

npm test                # unit tests (sandbox, log parser, ini builder, report parser)
npm run dry-run -- env  # exercise modules directly, no MCP client needed
npm run smoke-test      # write -> compile -> (backtest if MCP_MT5_LOGIN set) -> cleanup
npm run dev             # run the server directly with tsx, for local iteration

Verified end-to-end

Both compile and run_backtest have been run for real against a live MetaTrader 5 installation (build 6182) with a demo account, through the actual MCP server over stdio, not just their underlying modules:

• compile's log format (src/compile/logParser.ts) was verified against real MetaEditor64.exe /log output, including a clean compile and one with an error and a warning — see test/logParser.test.ts for the captured fixture. Exit codes were confirmed unreliable (one run exited 1 with zero errors, another exited 0 with a real error), which is why success is derived only from the parsed log plus a freshly-written .ex5.

• run_backtest's report parsing (src/backtest/reportParser.ts) was verified against a real Strategy Tester report. Two bugs surfaced only through this real run and are now fixed: Expert= needs Windows backslashes (a forward-slash value is silently ignored, and the terminal falls back to whichever EA it last remembers running — no error at all), and the report is written directly to the data folder root rather than under Tester/ as might be assumed (it's now parsed there, then moved into the sandboxed Files/.mcp/ scratch dir so repeated runs don't litter your live MetaTrader data folder). The real report's labels matched LABEL_MAP's guesses exactly for this build; if a different build/locale doesn't, the result's raw field always carries every parsed label/value pair regardless, so nothing is silently lost — extend LABEL_MAP from there if needed.