GitHub - modelcontextprotocol/registry: A community driven registry service for Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. (original) (raw)

The MCP registry provides MCP clients with a list of MCP servers, like an app store for MCP servers.

📤 Publish my MCP server | ⚡️ Live API docs | 👀 Ecosystem vision | 📖 Full documentation

Development Status

2025-10-24 update: The Registry API has entered an API freeze (v0.1) 🎉. For the next month or more, the API will remain stable with no breaking changes, allowing integrators to confidently implement support. This freeze applies to v0.1 while development continues on v0. We'll use this period to validate the API in real-world integrations and gather feedback to shape v1 for general availability. Thank you to everyone for your contributions and patience—your involvement has been key to getting us here!

2025-09-08 update: The registry has launched in preview 🎉 (announcement blog post). While the system is now more stable, this is still a preview release and breaking changes or data resets may occur. A general availability (GA) release will follow later. We'd love your feedback in GitHub discussions or in the #registry-dev Discord (joining details here).

Current key maintainers:

Adam Jones (Anthropic) @domdomegg
Tadas Antanavicius (PulseMCP) @tadasant
Toby Padilla (GitHub) @toby
Radoslav (Rado) Dimitrov (Stacklok) @rdimitrov

Contributing

We use multiple channels for collaboration - see modelcontextprotocol.io/community/communication.

Often (but not always) ideas flow through this pipeline:

Discord - Real-time community discussions
Discussions - Propose and discuss product/technical requirements
Issues - Track well-scoped technical work
Pull Requests - Contribute work towards issues

Quick start:

Pre-requisites

Docker
Go 1.24.x
ko - Container image builder for Go (installation instructions)
golangci-lint v2.4.0

Running the server

Start full development environment

make dev-compose

This starts the registry at localhost:8080 with PostgreSQL. The database uses ephemeral storage and is reset each time you restart the containers, ensuring a clean state for development and testing.

Note: The registry uses ko to build container images. The make dev-compose command automatically builds the registry image with ko and loads it into your local Docker daemon before starting the services.

By default, the registry seeds from the production API with a filtered subset of servers (to keep startup fast). This ensures your local environment mirrors production behavior and all seed data passes validation. For offline development you can seed from a file without validation with MCP_REGISTRY_SEED_FROM=data/seed.json MCP_REGISTRY_ENABLE_REGISTRY_VALIDATION=false make dev-compose.

The setup can be configured with environment variables in docker-compose.yml - see .env.example for a reference.

Alternative: Running a pre-built Docker image

Pre-built Docker images are automatically published to GitHub Container Registry:

Run latest stable release

docker run -p 8080:8080 ghcr.io/modelcontextprotocol/registry:latest

Run latest from main branch (continuous deployment)

docker run -p 8080:8080 ghcr.io/modelcontextprotocol/registry:main

Run specific release version

docker run -p 8080:8080 ghcr.io/modelcontextprotocol/registry:v1.0.0

Run development build from main branch

docker run -p 8080:8080 ghcr.io/modelcontextprotocol/registry:main-20250906-abc123d

Available tags:

Releases: latest, v1.0.0, v1.1.0, etc.
Continuous: main (latest main branch build)
Development: main-<date>-<sha> (specific commit builds)

Publishing a server

To publish a server, we've built a simple CLI. You can use it with:

Build the latest CLI

make publisher

Use it!

./bin/mcp-publisher --help

See the publisher guide for more details.

Other commands

Run lint, unit tests and integration tests

make check

There are also a few more helpful commands for development. Run make help to learn more, or look in Makefile.

Architecture

Project Structure

├── cmd/                     # Application entry points
│   └── publisher/           # Server publishing tool
├── data/                    # Seed data
├── deploy/                  # Deployment configuration (Pulumi)
├── docs/                    # Documentation
├── internal/                # Private application code
│   ├── api/                 # HTTP handlers and routing
│   ├── auth/                # Authentication (GitHub OAuth, JWT, namespace blocking)
│   ├── config/              # Configuration management
│   ├── database/            # Data persistence (PostgreSQL)
│   ├── service/             # Business logic
│   ├── telemetry/           # Metrics and monitoring
│   └── validators/          # Input validation
├── pkg/                     # Public packages
│   ├── api/                 # API types and structures
│   │   └── v0/              # Version 0 API types
│   └── model/               # Data models for server.json
├── scripts/                 # Development and testing scripts
├── tests/                   # Integration tests
└── tools/                   # CLI tools and utilities
    └── validate-*.sh        # Schema validation tools

Authentication

Publishing supports multiple authentication methods:

GitHub OAuth - For publishing by logging into GitHub
GitHub OIDC - For publishing from GitHub Actions
DNS verification - For proving ownership of a domain and its subdomains
HTTP verification - For proving ownership of a domain

The registry validates namespace ownership when publishing. E.g. to publish...:

io.github.domdomegg/my-cool-mcp you must login to GitHub as domdomegg, or be in a GitHub Action on domdomegg's repos
me.adamjones/my-cool-mcp you must prove ownership of adamjones.me via DNS or HTTP challenge

Community Projects

Check out community projects to explore notable registry-related work created by the community.