mcp-2-cli

Convert a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server to a CLI application.

This is useful if you want to use an MCP server's tools, resources, and prompts outside an MCP client. The mcp-2-cli library acts as a MCP client with the CLI as the interface.

You may want to use an MCP server's tools inside an Agent Skill or in a programmatic script.

Features

• Automatically generates CLI commands from MCP server capabilities
• Supports MCP prompts, resources, and tools
• JSON Schema validation for tool arguments
• Graceful error handling with JSONRPC error support

Supported Server Types

Currently, mcp-2-cli only supports stdio MCP servers.

Support for Streamable HTTP servers coming soon!

Configuration

You must first create a JSON configuration file with the following schema:

{
    "command": "<root command>", // Required
    "args": ["--additional", "args"] // Optional
    "transport": "stdio" // Required. currently only "stdio" supported
    "cliName": "<name>" // Optional. defaults to "mcp-cli"
}

For example:

{
  "command": "npx",
  "args": ["-y", "@modelcontextprotocol/server-filesystem", "."],
  "transport": "stdio",
  "cliName": "fs-cli"
}

mcp-2-cli will first look for this file in the environment variable MCP_2_CLI_CONFIG_PATH. If the environment variable is not provided, mcp-2-cli will look for a file named mcp-2-cli.config.json in the current directory.

To run the MCP CLI, you can use npx:

MCP_2_CLI_CONFIG_PATH="path/to/config.json" npx mcp-2-cli <args...>

CLI Commands

An mcp-2-cli CLI automatically get commands for all available prompts, resources, and tools.

The generated CLI follows CLI best practices, with nested actions and --help commands.

The CLI commands use the following pattern:

mcp-cli <action> <name> --arg1 val1 --arg2 val2 ... 

For example, to use the server-filesystem MCP's read_text_file tool:

server-filesystem tools read_text_file --path path/to/file.ext

If there are not any available actions for one of the prompts, resources or tools action categories, those actions categories will not be listed. For example, if your server supports only tools but no prompts and resources, only mcp-cli tools would be a valid command.

Prompts

# List all available prompts
mcp-cli prompts -help

# Get a specific prompt 
mcp-cli prompts <prompt-name>
# Get help with specific prompt
mcp-cli prompts <prompt-name> --help

Resources

# List all available resources
mcp-cli resources -help

# Get a specific resource
mcp-cli resources <resource-uri>
# Get help with a specific resource
mcp-cli resources <resource-uri> --help

Tools

# List all available tools
mcp-cli tools --help

# Call a tool (with optional arguments as JSON)
mcp-cli tools <tool-name> 
# Get help with a specific tool
mcp-cli tools <tool-name> --help

Use as Library

Installation

npm install mcp-2-cli

Basic Example

import { createMcpCli } from 'mcp-2-cli';

const config = {
  command: 'npx',
  args: ['-y', '@modelcontextprotocol/server-filesystem', '/tmp'],
  transport: 'stdio',
  name: "filesystem-cli"
};

const cli = await createMcpCli(config);
await cli.parseAsync();