MCP Python SDK

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<strong>Python implementation of the Model Context Protocol (MCP)</strong>

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[!NOTE] This is v2 of the MCP Python SDK, the current stable release line. It is a major rework of the SDK, both to support the 2026-07-28 MCP specification (and every earlier revision) and to fix long-standing architectural issues. Coming from v1? See What's new in v2 for the tour of what changed and the migration guide for every breaking change.

Not ready to migrate? v1.x lives on the v1.x branch, continues to receive critical bug fixes and security patches, and is documented at https://py.sdk.modelcontextprotocol.io/v1/. Since pip install mcp now installs 2.x, keep a <2 upper bound on your requirement (for example mcp>=1.28,<2) until you've migrated.

Something rough, confusing, or broken? Open an issue or find us in #python-sdk-dev on the MCP Contributors Discord.

Documentation

The documentation lives at https://py.sdk.modelcontextprotocol.io/.

It has a Get started guide, What's new in v2, the API reference, and the migration guide.

What is MCP?

The Model Context Protocol lets you build servers that expose data and functionality to LLM applications in a secure, standardized way. Think of it like a web API, but designed for LLM interactions. With this SDK you can:

• Build MCP servers that expose tools, resources, and prompts to any MCP host
• Build MCP clients that connect to any MCP server
• Speak every standard transport: stdio, Streamable HTTP, and SSE

Requirements

Python 3.10+.

Installation

uv add "mcp[cli]"      # or: pip install "mcp[cli]"

The cli extra adds the mcp command-line tool (mcp dev, mcp run, mcp install) on top of the SDK; install plain mcp if you don't need it. For one-off commands, uv run --with "mcp[cli]" mcp ... works without a project.

A server in 15 lines

Create a server.py:

<!-- snippet-source docs_src/index/tutorial001.py -->

from mcp.server import MCPServer

mcp = MCPServer("Demo")


@mcp.tool()
def add(a: int, b: int) -> int:
    """Add two numbers."""
    return a + b


@mcp.resource("greeting://{name}")
def greeting(name: str) -> str:
    """Greet someone by name."""
    return f"Hello, {name}!"

Full example: docs_src/index/tutorial001.py

<!-- /snippet-source -->

That's a complete MCP server: one tool, one templated resource. Open it in the MCP Inspector:

uv run mcp dev server.py

Call add with a=1, b=2 and you get 3 back.

Notice what you did not write: no JSON Schema (a: int, b: int is the schema), no request parsing, no validation code, no protocol handling. Two type-hinted Python functions and a docstring.

Get started takes it from here.

A client in 10 lines

The same package is a full MCP client. Client connects to a URL, a stdio subprocess, a custom transport, or (for tests) straight to a server object in memory with no transport at all:

import asyncio

from mcp import Client

from server import mcp


async def main() -> None:
    async with Client(mcp) as client:
        result = await client.call_tool("add", {"a": 1, "b": 2})
        print(result.structured_content)  # {'result': 3}


asyncio.run(main())

Swap mcp for "http://localhost:8000/mcp" and the exact same code talks to a remote server.

Contributing

We are passionate about supporting contributors of all levels of experience and would love to see you get involved in the project. See the contributing guide to get started.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.