genefoundry-router

A thin FastMCP 3.x aggregator that federates the GeneFoundry *-link MCP fleet behind a single Streamable-HTTP endpoint. A host adds one server — genefoundry — and gets every biomedical backend with collision-free <namespace>_<tool> naming and search-based discovery.

Why

An MCP host that mounted all 21 backends directly would face a wall of several hundred tools — more than a model can reason over, and a guarantee of name collisions. The router collapses that into one endpoint and replaces the flat catalog with a search surface, so a model finds the right tool by intent instead of by scrolling.

It is a client to each backend and a server to hosts: it namespaces and shapes the surface, but never rewrites a backend's data. The caller's token is never forwarded upstream.

Related MCP server: mcpproxy-go

Quick start

The fleet is hosted — no install required:

claude mcp add --transport http genefoundry https://genefoundry.org/mcp

Health check: genefoundry.org/health.

To run your own against the live fleet (Python 3.12+, uv):

uv sync --group dev
cp .env.example .env                    # set GF_*_URL backend URLs and GF_AUTH_MODE
uv run genefoundry-router run --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8000
curl -s localhost:8000/health | python -m json.tool

An offline fake fleet (make dev-fleet + make run-dev, or one-shot make test-e2e) runs the real router against impersonated backends over real Streamable-HTTP — no Docker, no network.

Tools

The router does not surface the federated catalog flat. A model sees three things:

search_tools(query="splicing prediction")   # → spliceai_predict_splicing (+ schema)
call_tool(name="spliceai_predict_splicing", arguments={...})

Pinning makes each domain's canonical tool reachable deterministically rather than by relevance luck. See How discovery works — including the two traps that bite MCP clients.

Federated backends

21 backends, 272 tools, each surfaced namespaced — e.g. gnomad_search_genes.

Data & provenance

The router serves no data of its own; each backend owns its sources, licences and citation guidance, and the router mirrors their disclaimers.

What it does own is integrity of the tool surface. A backend can serve a clean tool at review time and later change its definition — the channel for a rug pull. The router fingerprints every normalized tool definition and diffs the live fleet against a reviewed, packaged baseline (genefoundry_router/data/fleet-baseline.json), enforced at startup and on a schedule. See Deployment → drift detection.

Documentation

• Configuration & authentication — every GF_* variable, the OAuth/JWT resource-server modes, and the startup guards.

• Deployment — container release, digest pinning, rollback, and drift detection.

• How discovery works — the search surface, entry-point pinning, and how discoverability is measured.

• Design spec — the architecture and why it is shaped this way.

• Fleet standards — Tool-Naming · Response-Envelope · MCP-Behaviour · Tool-Surface-Budget · Tool-Schema-Documentation · Container-Hardening · Versioning · README.

Contributing

See AGENTS.md for engineering conventions. make ci-local is the definition-of-done gate: format, lint, line budget, README standard, mypy, and tests.

License

MIT © Bernt Popp. Each federated backend carries the licence and citation terms of its upstream data source; see that backend's repository.