mcp-x

An MCP server that gives an LLM the X (Twitter) API: read and search posts, manage users and lists, upload media, and publish — as the account whose keys it runs on.

Website · Costs · Credentials · Tools · Quick start · Configuration · Architecture · Contributing

What it is

mcp-x is a Model Context Protocol server written in Go. It exposes the X API v2 to any MCP-compatible client (Claude Desktop, IDE agents, custom LLM apps) as 42 tools covering posts, users, lists and media.

It authenticates with OAuth 1.0a user context, which means every call acts as a real X account — the one the four keys belong to. x_post_create publishes publicly. x_user_follow really follows. x_post_delete is irreversible. This is not a sandbox, and it is not free: see The X API costs money before you wire it into an agent.

Both transports the MCP SDK supports are available and expose the identical tool set:

• stdio — the client launches the binary and talks over stdin/stdout (the default, ideal for desktop clients).
• http — a long-running streamable HTTP server (useful for remote/shared deployments).

The X API costs money

Rates at the time of writing (official pricing — always re-check the Console, they have changed several times in 2026):

Two things follow from this, and both are baked into the server:

• Reads are charged per resource returned, not per request. max_results: 100 on x_posts_search costs twenty times what max_results: 5 costs for the same query. Every read tool's description tells the model to ask for the smallest max_results that answers the question, and the batching tools (x_posts_lookup, x_users_lookup) tell it to batch rather than loop.
• x_posts_count does not consume the post-read budget. It returns match counts bucketed by minute/hour/day for the same query syntax. Size a topic with x_posts_count first, then pay for x_posts_search.

X also deduplicates: the same resource fetched twice inside a 24-hour UTC window is billed once. And pay-per-use is capped at 3 million post reads per billing cycle — past that, only Enterprise.

When the money runs out the API answers with a distinct error, and the server maps it to a message that explicitly tells the model not to retry — see Errors.

Credentials

The server needs four OAuth 1.0a values, all from one X app:

X_API_KEY
X_API_KEY_SECRET
X_ACCESS_TOKEN
X_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET

The first pair identifies the app; the second pair identifies the account acting through it. mcp-x uses AuthenMethodOAuth1UserContext, not app-only bearer auth, because every write endpoint and every "me" endpoint (x_users_me, x_posts_home, x_bookmarks_list, mentions) requires a user context. There is no bearer-token mode.

Getting them — and the one step everybody gets wrong

1. Go to developer.x.com → your project → your app.
2. Open User authentication settings and set App permissions to Read and Write. Do this first.
3. Only then go to Keys and tokens and generate the Access Token and Secret.

the access token is read-only: set the app permissions to Read and Write
in the X Developer Console, then regenerate the Access Token and Secret

Startup verification

Before registering a single tool, the server calls GET /2/users/me once (client.Bootstrap) with a 15-second deadline. This does three jobs:

• proves the four keys are valid — bad keys fail the process, not the first tool call;
• catches the read-only-token trap above;
• caches the key owner's numeric user id, because every write endpoint is POST /2/users/:id/... and looking the id up per write would be another billed request.

A failure here is fatal by design. A server that starts and then fails every call is worse than one that does not start.

The cost of that choice is worth stating plainly: there is no way to try this server without a funded X developer account. No credentials means no startup, which means no tool list — /mcp and claude mcp list will show a failed connection and nothing else. To confirm an install short of that, run the binary with -version, and read the Tools section for what it would have exposed.

Keys are secrets

The four values are credentials for a live account with write access. Keep them in a file only you can read, pass it with -env, and never commit it — .env is gitignored, .env.example is the template. When running under an MCP client, the client's env block works too; it takes precedence over the .env file.

Tools

42 tools in four groups. Every tool carries MCP annotations: readOnlyHint on reads, destructiveHint on anything irreversible (x_post_delete, x_list_delete, unlike, unrepost, unfollow, member removal). Each returns a structured JSON payload matching its output schema; the SDK mirrors the same JSON into the text content block for clients that do not read structuredContent.

Every tool accepts an optional timeout_ms, clamped into the group's [MIN, MAX] window (see Limits).

Posts — reading

x_posts_search

Query operators go inside the query string:

x_posts_count

x_posts_lookup

x_posts_by_user

Timeline tools

x_posts_mentions, x_posts_home, x_posts_liked and x_bookmarks_list share one shape: max_results (1..100), pagination_token, timeout_ms. x_posts_quotes, x_post_liked_by and x_post_reposted_by add a required id.

Pagination is explicit and manual: a response carries next_token, and you pass it back as pagination_token for the next page. The server never walks pages on its own — each page is billed, so that decision stays with the caller.

Posts — writing

x_post_create

Publishing the same text twice in a row is rejected by X as a duplicate — the server surfaces that as a distinct message rather than a generic failure.

Users

Blocking and unblocking are deliberately not exposed. Reading the block list is.

Lists

Media

x_media_upload

Uploads an image, GIF or video with the chunked INIT → APPEND → FINALIZE flow and returns a media_id for x_post_create.

Two things to know:

• MEDIA_ROOT is a hard boundary. It is required configuration with no default, and the server refuses any path resolving outside it, symlinks included. Without it an LLM with this tool could read any file on the host and post it. Choose a dedicated directory.
• Video is transcoded asynchronously by X. The server polls FINALIZE status every MEDIA_POLL_INTERVAL_MS, but a slow encode can still return status: "pending". The media_id is valid but not yet postable — retry x_post_create shortly. A media_id expires after a while and is meant for a single post.

Partial results

The fan-out tools — x_posts_search, x_posts_count, x_posts_by_user — run their inputs in parallel and return one entry per query/username, each with its own status, so one bad input does not lose the results that worked. x_posts_lookup does the same per id (not found sits next to the posts that resolved), and x_users_lookup collects unresolved names in not_found.

A call fails outright only when the input is rejected before any work starts, or when every item in it fails.

Errors

Failures come back as a tool result with isError: true and a plain-text message, not as a JSON-RPC error — the model reads the message and can correct the call itself. The messages are written for a model rather than a log reader, so the ones that must not be retried say so explicitly.

Classification happens in adapter/x/apierr, and it is deliberately defensive. X answers errors with Content-Type: application/problem+json, which the underlying gotwi client does not recognise as JSON — so the entire problem body lands verbatim in a message field instead of being decoded into typed fields. The mapper therefore concatenates every source the response can carry and matches problem types (oauth1-permissions, usage-capped, credits-depleted, rate-limit-exceeded, …) against that haystack, falling back to HTTP status codes when nothing matches.

Known limitations

• Recent search only. 7 days back, full stop. Historical/archive search is a different (Enterprise) product and is not wired up.
• Blocking is not exposed. x_users_blocked reads the list; there is no block/unblock tool.
• No streaming endpoints. Filtered/sampled stream is not implemented.
• No DMs.
• One account per process. The keys are process-wide; the key owner is resolved once at startup. Serving several accounts means several processes.
• Pagination is manual. Tools return next_token; nothing walks pages automatically, because every page is billed.

Quick start

Install

Pick whichever fits — all of them give the identical server.

Container (no Go toolchain needed):

docker pull ghcr.io/role1776/mcp-x:0.1.1     # or :latest to track the newest release

Pin an explicit version in anything you rely on. :latest moves on every stable release, and a release can add or change tool behaviour; server.json pins the same version the MCP Registry advertises.

Prebuilt binary — grab the archive for your platform from the latest release, unpack it, and put mcp-x on your PATH.

MCP Bundle — for clients that install .mcpb files, download mcp-x_<version>_<os>_<arch>.mcpb from the latest release and open it with your client. The bundle carries the compiled binary, so it needs neither Docker nor Go, and the client prompts for the five required values on install. Pick the file matching your OS and CPU architecture: a bundle holds one native binary.

From source (needs Go 1.26+):

git clone https://github.com/Role1776/mcp-x
cd mcp-x
make build          # -> bin/mcp-x

go install also works, with one caveat worth knowing before you type it:

go install github.com/Role1776/mcp-x/app/cmd/mcp-x@latest

The Go module lives in app/, so the release tags (v0.1.0) do not name it — @v0.1.0 fails outright and @latest resolves to a pseudo-version of the newest commit on main. A go install build also reports its version as dev, because the version is stamped in by the release pipeline and not by the module. For a build that matches a release exactly, use the prebuilt binary, the container, or make build from a checked-out tag.

Configure

From a clone, or from an unpacked release archive (both ship the template):

cp .env.example .env
$EDITOR .env        # fill in the four X_* keys and MEDIA_ROOT

Installing from the container or an .mcpb bundle gives you no checkout to copy from — take the template from .env.example, or skip the file entirely and pass the five values in your client's env block (below).

Five values are required; everything else has a default. MEDIA_ROOT must be an absolute path to a directory that already exists — the server checks this at startup and refuses to start otherwise, rather than failing at the first upload.

Run

./bin/mcp-x -env /absolute/path/to/.env

A successful start logs the authenticated account:

INFO authenticated with the X API op=app.Run user_id=1234567890
INFO MCP server has started op=app.Run transport=stdio

Connecting an MCP client (stdio)

Claude Code — one command, credentials inline (-- separates the server's own command from the flags above it):

claude mcp add mcp-x \
  -e X_API_KEY=... \
  -e X_API_KEY_SECRET=... \
  -e X_ACCESS_TOKEN=... \
  -e X_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET=... \
  -e MEDIA_ROOT=/absolute/path/to/media \
  -- /absolute/path/to/mcp-x

Or point it at a .env file instead: -- /absolute/path/to/mcp-x -env /absolute/path/to/.env. Check the result with claude mcp list, or /mcp inside a session.

Claude Desktop and other clients that take a JSON config — point them at the built binary:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "x": {
      "command": "/absolute/path/to/mcp-x",
      "args": ["-env", "/absolute/path/to/.env"]
    }
  }
}

Or skip the file and pass the credentials in the env block — variables already in the environment win over the .env file, so a client's env block always takes effect:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "x": {
      "command": "/absolute/path/to/mcp-x",
      "env": {
        "X_API_KEY": "...",
        "X_API_KEY_SECRET": "...",
        "X_ACCESS_TOKEN": "...",
        "X_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET": "...",
        "MEDIA_ROOT": "/absolute/path/to/media"
      }
    }
  }
}

Connecting an MCP client (container)

Run the image on stdio. Docker needs each variable named on the command line with -e for it to reach the process, and MEDIA_ROOT only makes sense if the directory is mounted:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "x": {
      "command": "docker",
      "args": [
        "run", "-i", "--rm",
        "-e", "X_API_KEY",
        "-e", "X_API_KEY_SECRET",
        "-e", "X_ACCESS_TOKEN",
        "-e", "X_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET",
        "-e", "MEDIA_ROOT",
        "-v", "/host/media:/media:ro",
        "ghcr.io/role1776/mcp-x:0.1.1"
      ],
      "env": {
        "X_API_KEY": "...",
        "X_API_KEY_SECRET": "...",
        "X_ACCESS_TOKEN": "...",
        "X_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET": "...",
        "MEDIA_ROOT": "/media"
      }
    }
  }
}

-i is required — without it the container gets no stdin and the client sees the server die immediately. Clients that install from the MCP Registry itself build this invocation themselves and prompt for the variables declared in server.json — that is a property of the client, not of every client that can talk to this server; Claude Code's CLI, for one, does not install from the registry, so use claude mcp add above.

When the client says the connection closed

Under stdio the server's stderr belongs to the client, and most clients discard it. So a configuration problem that the server explains perfectly well in one line reaches you as nothing but:

✘ Failed to connect — -32000: Connection closed

Run the binary by hand with the same environment to see the real reason:

/absolute/path/to/mcp-x -env /absolute/path/to/.env

It prints exactly what is wrong — which variables are missing and where to get them, or that the keys were rejected, or that the access token is read-only — and exits. Almost every failed install is one of those three.

Running over HTTP

Set MCP_TRANSPORT=http and the server listens on SERVER_PORT at MCP_PATH (default http://localhost:8080/mcp).

Configuration

Everything is configured through environment variables, and each value is validated before startup: a missing required key, or a non-numeric or non-positive number, is a startup error naming the variable you actually set (X_API_KEY, not APIKey). Relationships between limits are not checked at startup — see Limits. Variables already present in the environment win over a .env file.

See .env.example for the full list at its default values, ready to copy to .env.

Required

Missing any of them aborts startup with the list of what is missing plus a pointer to the Developer Console.

MCP server

The version advertised to clients is not configurable: it is stamped into the binary at build time from the git tag.

HTTP server (http transport only)

HTTP client

Logging

Limits

Each group has its own limits, so a slow media upload cannot be capped by a search timeout.

Posts

Users

Lists

Media

Each value is checked on its own — it must be greater than zero, and the ones the API itself bounds (*_MAX_IDS, POSTS_MAX_RESULTS, LISTS_MAX_RESULTS, POSTS_MAX_DAYS) are additionally capped at the API's ceiling so a typo cannot produce a request X will reject. The DEFAULT_*, MIN_* and MAX_* triples are not cross-checked against each other at startup. An inconsistent set does not stop the server; it is reconciled per request instead:

• a value the caller omits, or passes as zero or negative, falls back to the matching DEFAULT_*;
• the result is then clamped into [MIN_*, MAX_*], so a DEFAULT_* larger than its MAX_* simply yields MAX_*;
• if MIN_* exceeds MAX_*, the maximum wins.

The effective limit is therefore always within the configured maximum, and misconfiguration degrades to a working server rather than a failed start. The trade-off is that it degrades silently: POSTS_MAX_RESULTS=1 instead of 10 produces no warning, only quietly smaller responses. Worth double-checking these values when results look truncated.

Architecture

The project follows a clean, layered structure. Dependencies point inward toward the domain, and each layer talks to the next through interfaces.

app/                       the Go module: sources plus its build files
                           (Dockerfile, .dockerignore, .goreleaser.yaml)

cmd/mcp-x/main.go          entry point: parse flags, load config, run app

internal/
  app/                     wiring + lifecycle (X client, bootstrap, run, graceful shutdown)
  config/                  config loading (.env → env vars → validate → env-name error messages)
  domain/x/                core types and errors
    posts/ users/ lists/ media/   value objects: PostID, UserID, Username, Draft, Query, Upload…
    format.go              shared snowflake-id and username validation
    errors.go              the sentinel error set the whole app maps onto
  dto/x/                   request/response shapes for the MCP tools, with jsonschema + validate tags
  transport/mcp/           MCP layer
    router/                registers every tool group on the MCP server
    x/posts|users|lists|media/   tool definitions, handlers and error → tool-result mapping
  usecase/x/               business logic: validation, parallelism, timeouts, limit resolution
  adapter/x/               X API wiring
    client/                gotwi client + startup Bootstrap (key check, key-owner id)
    apierr/                X problem responses → domain errors
    posts|users|lists|media/     endpoint calls and mappers to DTOs
  pkg/                     reusable building blocks (mcpserver, server, logger, validator, parallel)

Request flow for a tool call:

MCP client → transport/mcp/x/... (handler) → usecase/x/... → adapter/x/... → gotwi → X API
                    ↑ maps errors                 ↑ validates, resolves limits,
                      to isError text               fans out, applies timeouts

Two boundaries are worth calling out:

• The domain layer refuses to construct invalid values. NewPostID, NewUserID, NewUsername, NewDraft and friends validate on construction, so a malformed id or a 300-character post is rejected locally — before it costs a request. Ids are checked against the snowflake format and usernames against X's 1–15 [A-Za-z0-9_] rule in a single shared format package.
• Every layer speaks the same error vocabulary. Adapters convert X's problem responses into the sentinels in domain/x/errors.go; the transport layer is the only place that turns a sentinel into human text. That is why the same failure reads identically no matter which of the 42 tools produced it.

Development

Everything Go lives in app/, so either use the makefile from the repository root or pass -C app to the toolchain:

make build          # compile the binary -> bin/mcp-x
make test           # go test -v ./...
make cover          # total coverage percentage
make cover-html     # coverage report in the browser
make version        # the version that would be stamped into the binary

go -C app build ./...
go -C app test ./...
go -C app vet ./...

Mocks are generated with mockgen from the //go:generate directives next to each usecase interface:

go -C app generate ./...

New code is expected to come with tests. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full pull-request guidelines.

License

Released under the MIT License.