Basic Tutorial¶

This tutorial walks you through using mcpd from setup to making requests to a running MCP server.

1. Install `mcpd` via Homebrew¶

brew tap mozilla-ai/tap
brew install mcpd

Installation methods

Please see our Installation page for additional ways to install and run mcpd.

2. Initialize the Project¶

mcpd init

Config File Location

This creates an .mcpd.toml file in your current directory.

3. Add an MCP Server¶

Add the latest version of the time server:

mcpd add time

You can also restrict access to allow only specific tools:

mcpd add time --tool get_current_time

Experiment with MCP servers

You can quickly experiment with MCP servers before properly adding them to the mcpd configuration, by running the inspector tool:

mcpd inspector

For more information, please refer to the official documentation of the tool.

4. Set Startup Arguments¶

Configure any startup flags for the server, in this case --local-timezone is optional, but let's set it:

mcpd config args set time -- --local-timezone=Europe/London

5. Start the Daemon¶

Start mcpd, which launches MCP servers and exposes the HTTP API:

mcpd daemon

API Endpoint

The API docs will be available at http://localhost:8090/docs

6. Query Running Servers¶

List all running servers:

curl -s http://localhost:8090/api/v1/servers | jq

7. Call a Tool on a Server¶

Make a request to a tool on a specific MCP server:

curl -s -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d '{"timezone": "America/New_York"}' \
     http://localhost:8090/api/v1/servers/time/tools/get_current_time | jq

8. Use `mcpd` in your Agentic Python application¶

For examples on using mcpd with agents in Python, please refer to the Python SDK documentation.