allow-mcp

One command to whitelist all MCP tools from a server in Claude Code.

npx allow-mcp <server-name>

Why?

When you add an MCP server to Claude Code that exposes many tools, you get prompted to approve each tool individually. There's no built-in way to bulk-approve.

You can manually edit ~/.claude/settings.json to add a glob pattern like mcp__myserver__* to permissions.allowedTools, but that's a manual JSON-editing step that kills onboarding UX.

There's also an open bug where the --allowedTools CLI flag doesn't properly expand wildcard patterns for MCP tools, so editing settings.json is the only reliable path.

allow-mcp does that for you in one command.

Usage

# Add an MCP server and whitelist its tools
claude mcp add capture-the-lobster -- npx capture-the-lobster-mcp
npx allow-mcp capture-the-lobster
# Done! Ask Claude: "How do I play?"

Remove a server's whitelist entry

npx allow-mcp --remove capture-the-lobster

Options

--help, -h       Show help
--version, -v    Show version
--remove, -r     Remove server from allowedTools

What it does

1. Reads ~/.claude/settings.json (creates it if missing)
2. Adds mcp__<server-name>__* to permissions.allowedTools
3. Writes the file back

That's it. Zero dependencies, runs instantly via npx.

License

MIT