MCP Registry

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

📖 Full documentation

Development Status

> [!WARNING]
> The registry is under active development. The registry API spec is unstable and the official MCP registry database may be wiped at any time.

2025-09-04 update: We're targeting a 'preview' go-live on 8th September. This may still be unstable and not provide durability guarantees, but is a step towards being more solidified. A general availability (GA) release will follow later.

Current key maintainers:
- Adam Jones (Anthropic) @domdomegg
- Tadas Antanavicius (PulseMCP) @tadasant
- Toby Padilla (GitHub) @toby

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

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#### Pre-requisites

- Docker
- Go 1.24.x
- golangci-lint v2.4.0

#### Running the server

``bash


Start full development environment


make dev-compose
`

This starts the registry at localhost:8080 with PostgreSQL and seed data. It can be configured with environment variables in docker-compose.yml - see .env.example for a reference.

Alternative: Local setup without Docker

Prerequisites:
- PostgreSQL running locally
- Go 1.24.x installed

`bash


Build and run locally


make build
make dev-local
`

The service runs on localhost:8080 by default. This can be configured with environment variables in .env - see .env.example for a reference.

Alternative: Running a pre-built Docker image

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

`bash


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-- (specific commit builds)

#### Publishing a server

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

`bash


Build the latest CLI

make publisher

Use it!

./bin/mcp-publisher --help
`

See the publisher guide for more details.

#### Other commands

`bash


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

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`
├── 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, in-memory)
│ ├── 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
`

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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

More documentation

See the documentation for more details if your question has not been answered here!