Connect MCP clients

muster is an MCP server. Any client that speaks the Model Context Protocol connects to it and receives the meta-tools; the aggregated catalogue is reached through them. This guide has the configuration for the common clients, locally and against a remote muster.

Which entry point

Situation	Configure the client with
One IDE on a laptop, nothing else running	muster standalone: aggregator and stdio bridge in one process
A muster serve you keep running, or several clients on one machine	muster agent --mcp-server: stdio bridge to the local aggregator
A remote muster and a client that cannot do OAuth itself	muster agent --mcp-server --endpoint https://muster.example.com/mcp: the bridge handles the browser login
A remote muster and a client that speaks MCP over HTTP with OAuth	the endpoint URL directly, no bridge

standalone and agent --mcp-server speak stdio towards the client, which every desktop client supports. The bridge forwards MCP messages unchanged; the meta-tools come from the aggregator.

Cursor

~/.cursor/mcp.json (global) or .cursor/mcp.json in a project:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "muster": {
      "command": "muster",
      "args": ["standalone"]
    }
  }
}

For a remote muster replace the arguments with ["agent", "--mcp-server", "--endpoint", "https://muster.example.com/mcp"].

VS Code

.vscode/mcp.json in the workspace, or the user-level mcp.json from the command palette (MCP: Open User Configuration):

{
  "servers": {
    "muster": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "muster",
      "args": ["standalone"]
    }
  }
}

VS Code also connects over HTTP: {"type": "http", "url": "http://localhost:8090/mcp"} against a local muster serve, or the URL of a remote muster, where VS Code runs the OAuth login itself.

Claude Code

claude mcp add muster -- muster standalone

or, against a running aggregator, over HTTP:

claude mcp add --transport http muster http://localhost:8090/mcp
claude mcp add --transport http muster https://muster.example.com/mcp   # remote, OAuth login in the browser

Claude Desktop

claude_desktop_config.json (macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/, Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "muster": {
      "command": "muster",
      "args": ["standalone"]
    }
  }
}

Any client, over HTTP

The aggregator serves MCP over streamable HTTP at /mcp (and the older SSE transport at /sse). A client that implements the MCP authorization flow connects to a protected muster without a bridge: muster publishes the protected-resource metadata (/.well-known/oauth-protected-resource), accepts clients that identify themselves with a client metadata document (CIMD) and offers dynamic client registration where the deployment allows it. The HTTP endpoints reference lists every path.

Clients that can set request headers can declare a toolset with X-muster-Toolset, for example preset:read-only, and see and call only that part of the catalogue.

Remote muster through the bridge

For clients that only speak stdio, muster agent --mcp-server is the bridge to a remote muster. On the first request that needs it, the bridge opens the browser for the login, stores the tokens under ~/.config/muster/tokens/ and refreshes them from then on.

muster context add prod --endpoint https://muster.example.com/mcp --use
muster auth login

With a context in place, ["agent", "--mcp-server"] needs no --endpoint; the bridge uses the current context. --context <name> or MUSTER_CONTEXT select another one, and --disable-auto-sso stops the bridge from also signing you in to the remote MCP servers that muster forwards your identity to. Authenticate the CLI has the details.

Checking the connection

Ask the assistant which tools are available: it should call list_tools and describe a paged catalogue. If the client shows no tools, run the same command the client runs in a terminal (muster standalone --mcp-server or muster agent --mcp-server) and read its output on stderr; muster agent --repl against the same endpoint shows whether the aggregator itself is reachable. Troubleshooting AI agents continues from there.