Features

• 🔍 MCP Discovery: Automatically detect MCP servers across various AI applications and agentic IDEs
• 📁 Directory Bubbling: Intelligent discovery of project-scoped MCP configs from nested directories, supporting project-scoped MCP Server configuration and global configurations
• 🔄 Process Detection: Real-time status of running MCP servers
• 🔒 Credential Analysis: Security analysis of environment variables and API keys for potentially exposed credentials in MCP Servers

Usage: CLI

npx ls-mcp

Analyze Specific Files

To analyze specific MCP configuration files instead of using automatic discovery, use the --files flag. This flag replaces automatic discovery and only analyzes the files you specify:

# Single file
npx ls-mcp --files ./mcp-config.json

# Multiple files (comma-separated)
npx ls-mcp --files ./config1.json,./config2.json

# Multiple files (space-separated)
npx ls-mcp --files ./config1.json ./config2.json

The --files flag automatically detects the configuration structure in your files, supporting various formats including:

• servers - Standard MCP configuration key
• mcpServers - Alternative MCP configuration key
• mcp.servers - Nested configuration format
• context_servers - Context-based configuration format

Show All Providers

By default, ls-mcp hides providers that have zero configured servers to reduce clutter. To show all providers including those with empty configurations, use the --all or -a flag:

# Show all providers including empty ones
npx ls-mcp --all

# Short form
npx ls-mcp -a

# Combine with JSON output
npx ls-mcp --all --json

Note: When using --files to analyze specific configuration files, the custom group is always shown even if it contains zero servers, as you explicitly requested to analyze those files.

JSON Output

To output results in JSON format (useful for programmatic consumption):

npx ls-mcp --json

# Combine with --files flag
npx ls-mcp --files ./config.json --json

This will return a structured JSON object containing:

• mcpFiles: Complete MCP server configurations organized by provider (only includes providers with configured servers unless --all is specified)
• summary: Statistics including total servers, running servers, credential warnings, and transport breakdown

Debug Mode

To enable verbose debugging output, set the NODE_DEBUG environment variable:

# Enable debug logging for ls-mcp
NODE_DEBUG=ls-mcp npx ls-mcp

# Enable all debug logging
NODE_DEBUG=* npx ls-mcp

Documentation

For detailed information about the project architecture and features:

• Project Overview: Comprehensive project analysis and architecture
• Design Documentation: Technical design decisions and implementation details
• Requirements: Functional and non-functional requirements
• Custom File Analysis: Analyze specific MCP configuration files with the --files flag
• Directory Bubbling: Intelligent directory traversal feature
• URL Hostname Extraction: Clean display of hostnames for URL-based servers
• Credential Detection: Security analysis features

Author

ls-mcp © Liran Tal, Released under the Apache-2.0 License.