netscli

Network diagnostics CLI, terminal UI, and MCP server, written in Rust. Discovery, port scans, ping, DNS, ARP, mDNS — with structured JSON output and an MCP server so a model can use the same operations.

Full documentation: netscli.com

Use it without installing

npx netscli scan-ports 192.168.1.1

This package carries no code of its own. It declares one small package per platform and npm fetches the single prebuilt binary that matches yours.

As an MCP server

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "netscli": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "netscli", "serve"]
    }
  }
}

If you already have netscli installed, use the binary instead — set "command": "netscli" and drop the npx -y. You get the version you chose rather than whatever latest resolves to at launch, you skip a second copy of a 13 MB binary, and packet capture works, which it cannot here.

What is missing from the npm build

• Packet capture. capture_pcap and the capture jobs need libpcap or Npcap on the machine, so those builds are not published to npm. Everything else works.
• The desktop app. GUI installers come from the releases page or a system package manager.
• Anything outside linux-x64, linux-arm64, darwin-x64, darwin-arm64 and windows-x64. Other targets are built, just not shipped here.

For those, and for a copy on your PATH that your system updates:

winget install fstubner.netscli     # Windows
brew install fstubner/tap/netscli   # macOS
cargo install netscli               # anywhere with Rust

Scanning other people's networks

The MCP server refuses targets outside your local networks unless you set NETSCLI_MCP_ALLOW_PUBLIC_TARGETS=1. The CLI does not — it does what you type.

The split is deliberate. The MCP server is the one surface where the instruction to scan something can come from a web page or a file a model read, rather than from you, and the packets leave from your machine and your IP either way. Scanning hosts you own is a fair reason to set the variable.

License

MIT