MCP Registry
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:
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
Running the server
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. Note that the image does not bundle PostgreSQL, so you need to run your own and point the registry at it via MCP_REGISTRY_DATABASE_URL (see docker-compose.yml for a working example):
docker run -p 8080:8080 ghcr.io/modelcontextprotocol/registry:latest
docker run -p 8080:8080 ghcr.io/modelcontextprotocol/registry:main
docker run -p 8080:8080 ghcr.io/modelcontextprotocol/registry:v1.0.0
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:
make publisher
./bin/mcp-publisher --help
See the publisher guide for more details.
Other commands
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 reposme.adamjones/my-cool-mcp you must prove ownership of adamjones.me via DNS or HTTP challenge
Check out community projects to explore notable registry-related work created by the community.
More documentation
See the documentation for more details if your question has not been answered here!