modelcontextprotocol/servers

Model Context Protocol Servers

Summary

The modelcontextprotocol/servers repository is a curated set of reference implementations for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), maintained by the MCP steering group. Each server demonstrates a different way to expose tools, prompts, and resources to Large Language Models through official SDKs in TypeScript, Python, and other supported languages. The README explicitly warns that these are educational examples, not production-ready solutions, and directs users to evaluate their own security requirements before deployment.

What it is useful for

This repository is useful for engineers who want to learn the MCP specification by reading working code, and for those building prototypes that need a quick local server to test against an MCP client. The active reference servers cover common integration patterns: Filesystem shows configurable access controls, Git exposes repository inspection, Memory demonstrates a knowledge-graph persistence layer, Fetch handles web content conversion for LLM consumption, and Time handles timezone logic. There is also a Sequential Thinking server for structured problem solving and an Everything reference used to validate SDK behavior across prompts, resources, and tools.

For discovering maintained third-party servers (such as the now-archived GitHub, GitLab, Slack, or PostgreSQL integrations), the README redirects to a separate community registry rather than treating the archive as a current catalog.

How engineers can use it

The README documents two ways to run the servers. TypeScript implementations can be launched directly with npx:

npx -y @modelcontextprotocol/server-memory

Python implementations can be launched with uvx (recommended) or pip:

uvx mcp-server-git

Running a server alone is not useful; it must be wired into an MCP client. The README shows a Claude Desktop configuration that registers a server under an mcpServers key, passing arguments such as a directory path or repository location, plus environment variables for tokens like GITHUB_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN. Windows users are instructed to wrap npx calls with cmd /c and prepend /c to the arguments.

For engineers writing their own server, the src/ directory contains the source for each reference, and the README points to language-specific SDK repositories (C#, Go, Java, Kotlin, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, Swift, TypeScript) plus the official documentation site for guides and best practices.

Documented limitations include the reference-only nature of the code, the requirement that engineers evaluate their own threat model before deployment, and the absence of a maintained community-server index in this repo.