MCP Registry

The MCP Registry is a community-driven registry service for Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, hosted by the modelcontextprotocol organization on GitHub. It gives MCP clients a list of MCP servers, which the README compares to an app store. The repository contains the Go registry API server, a publisher CLI, and documentation.

What It Is

The registry is a service that stores and serves metadata about MCP servers. Server authors publish entries described by a server.json file, and MCP clients and other integrators query the registry API to discover available servers. The repository includes the registry API server, the mcp-publisher CLI, data models for server.json, and PostgreSQL-backed persistence.

Publishing and Namespace Verification

Servers are published with the mcp-publisher CLI from the server's own project. Opening a pull request that adds a server.json or a seed data entry to this repository does not publish a server. Supported authentication methods are GitHub OAuth, GitHub OIDC for GitHub Actions, DNS verification, and HTTP verification. The registry validates namespace ownership. For example, publishing io.github.domdomegg/my-cool-mcp requires logging in as that GitHub user or running in that user's GitHub Actions, while a domain-based namespace such as me.adamjones/my-cool-mcp requires proving ownership of the domain through a DNS or HTTP challenge.

Running It Locally

Developers can start a full local environment with make dev-compose, which runs the registry at localhost:8080 with PostgreSQL on ephemeral storage. By default it seeds from a filtered subset of the production API. A pre-built Docker image is published to GitHub Container Registry, though it does not bundle PostgreSQL. Prerequisites are Docker, Go, ko, and golangci-lint.

Current Status

The README's 2025-10-24 update says the Registry API entered an API freeze (v0.1) with no breaking changes planned for a month or more, while development continues on v0 and feedback shapes v1 general availability. The earlier 2025-09-08 update describes the launch as a preview release in which breaking changes or data resets may occur.