longhorn-mcp

An MCP server for the Longhorn distributed storage manager API. Full read/write coverage of Longhorn's REST API (volumes, snapshots, backups, backing images, nodes, settings, engine images, recurring jobs, and more), a --read-only mode, both stdio and Streamable HTTP transports, and an official Helm chart.

AI-assisted development. The majority of this codebase — implementation, tests, and this documentation — was written with AI assistance (Claude). Review accordingly, especially before running write-mode tools against a production Longhorn cluster.

Quick start

npx -y longhorn-mcp --longhorn-url=http://<longhorn-manager-host>:9500

Longhorn's manager API is unauthenticated — reachability is the only access control. If you're not running this against an in-cluster Longhorn (see Connecting popular MCP clients → Remote/HTTP), you'll need a VPN, SSH tunnel, or kubectl port-forward svc/longhorn-backend 9500:9500 to reach it safely. Never expose Longhorn's manager API directly to an untrusted network.

Related MCP server: Rancher MCP Server

CLI reference

Deploying with Helm

An official chart is published alongside every release:

helm install longhorn-mcp oci://ghcr.io/rafaelgaspar/longhorn-mcp/charts/longhorn-mcp --version 0.1.0 \
  --set args[0]=--http \
  --set args[1]=--longhorn-url=http://longhorn-backend.longhorn-system.svc.cluster.local:9500

Key values:

Full schema: chart/values.yaml / chart/values.schema.json.

The chart is also attached as an OCI referrer directly on the image manifest, for tooling that discovers charts via the OCI Referrers API instead of pulling a separately tagged artifact:

oras discover ghcr.io/rafaelgaspar/longhorn-mcp:0.1.0

Connecting popular MCP clients

Each client's exact config file path/key can drift between versions — check the client's own docs if these don't work. All of them accept the same underlying command/args shape for a local stdio server.

Claude Code

claude mcp add longhorn -- npx -y longhorn-mcp --longhorn-url=http://localhost:9500

Claude Desktop

Edit claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "longhorn": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "longhorn-mcp", "--longhorn-url=http://localhost:9500"]
    }
  }
}

Cursor

Edit .cursor/mcp.json (project-scoped) or ~/.cursor/mcp.json (global):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "longhorn": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "longhorn-mcp", "--longhorn-url=http://localhost:9500"]
    }
  }
}

VS Code (Copilot Chat)

.vscode/mcp.json uses a servers key (not mcpServers):

{
  "servers": {
    "longhorn": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "longhorn-mcp", "--longhorn-url=http://localhost:9500"]
    }
  }
}

Remote/HTTP

To point a client at an already-running Streamable HTTP instance (e.g. this server deployed in-cluster, see Deploying with Helm) instead of spawning a local npx process, use that client's remote-MCP configuration with the server's /mcp URL. Clients without native remote-HTTP MCP support can bridge via mcp-remote.

Running behind a gateway

Longhorn's manager API — and by extension this server — has no authentication of its own; reachability is the access control (see Quick start). For a multi-tenant or externally-reachable deployment, fronting --http mode with an MCP-aware gateway (e.g. Envoy AI Gateway or similar) for auth, rate limiting, and routing is a good idea. It's not required, though — a private network boundary (VPN, SSH tunnel, cluster-internal only) is a perfectly reasonable standalone posture too, and is exactly what the Helm chart defaults to (route.enabled: false, no external exposure).

Destructive-action guardrails

--read-only is an enforced, structural guarantee (see below); the following is a softer, model-facing one — it shapes what a well-behaved LLM should do, not what the server can refuse.

Every tool whose action is destructive or hard to reverse (deletes, force-detaches, reverts, restores cluster-wide state, evicts a node, deploys an arbitrary engine image, redirects a backup target, etc.) has its description suffixed with an explicit instruction not to call it unless the user has explicitly authorized that specific action in the current conversation, and never proactively, speculatively, or as a side effect of an unrelated task. The server's MCP instructions field (surfaced by clients that support it, in addition to each tool's own description) repeats the same guidance at the server level as a backstop for tools called without reading their full description closely.

This is advisory, not enforced — a client or model can ignore it. It reduces the chance of an LLM calling volume_delete or systemrestore_create as an unprompted "helpful" side effect; it is not a substitute for --read-only where that's the guarantee you actually need.

Longhorn documentation links

Most tool descriptions end with a Longhorn docs: <url> link to the relevant page in Longhorn's official documentation, pinned to the Longhorn version this server's default --longhorn-url target runs (currently 1.12.0) rather than "latest," so the linked content matches the API version actually in use. A handful of tools with no clearly corresponding doc page (instancemanager_*, volumeattachment_*, longhorn_events, the longhorn_raw_request/longhorn_list_resource_types/longhorn_describe_resource_type introspection tools) don't have one.

Read-only mode

--read-only enforces itself two ways:

1. Registration-time filtering — every write tool is simply never advertised in tools/list, so a read-only instance's tool set is a strict subset of the read-write one.

2. Client-layer guard — LonghornClient refuses any non-GET request regardless of which tool triggered it. This is what protects longhorn_raw_request, the one escape-hatch tool that stays registered in both modes (its write-ness isn't known until it's actually called).

Run both a read-write and a read-only instance under different names in the same client config if you want an LLM session to default to read-only but have an explicit, differently-named write-capable tool set available:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "longhorn": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "longhorn-mcp", "--longhorn-url=http://localhost:9500"] },
    "longhorn-readonly": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "longhorn-mcp", "--read-only", "--longhorn-url=http://localhost:9500"] }
  }
}

Development

npm ci
npm run typecheck
npm test
npm run build

scripts/introspect-schema.ts dumps a live Longhorn manager's self-described /v1/schemas — useful for cross-checking this package's hand-written tool coverage against whatever Longhorn version you're actually running:

npm run introspect-schema -- http://localhost:9500
npm run introspect-schema -- http://localhost:9500 volume   # one resource type in full

Contributing

Contributions are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md for dev setup, coding conventions, and how releases work.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.