Creativity · MCP — overview

MCP Registry and Discovery

Discoverability is a first-class problem for Model Context Protocol. The ecosystem has converged on a few complementary surfaces: the modelcontextprotocol/servers reference repo for officially supported servers, the MCP Registry (launched 2025) as a neutral index, vendor catalogues (Anthropic, Cloudflare, Smithery), and client-side marketplaces inside Cursor and Cline that install a server in one click.

MCP facts

Kind: overview
Ecosystem: anthropic-mcp
Transports: stdio, http, sse

Capabilities

Reference repo: canonical, Anthropic-maintained MCP servers
MCP Registry: open, vendor-neutral index with metadata and health pings
Client marketplaces: one-click install UX inside Cursor, Cline, Zed
Programmatic discovery: ListTools / ListResources inside each server

Configuration

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "filesystem": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@modelcontextprotocol/server-filesystem", "/Users/you"]
    }
  }
}

Frequently asked questions

Where is the authoritative list of MCP servers?

github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers holds Anthropic-maintained reference servers. For the wider ecosystem use the MCP Registry and community lists like Awesome MCP Servers. Each client (Cursor, Cline, Zed) also ships a curated marketplace.

How does an MCP client discover tools at runtime?

Once connected, the client calls the server's tools/list, resources/list, and prompts/list RPCs. That is the in-protocol discovery loop: it tells the model what is available in the current session without shipping a hard-coded schema.

Is there an MCP analogue of an npm package.json?

Yes — the MCP Registry uses a server manifest (server.json) with name, version, transports, and publisher metadata. It lets registries, client marketplaces, and package managers present servers uniformly.

How do I publish my own MCP server?

Build it against the MCP SDK, publish to npm or PyPI, write a server.json manifest, and submit it to the MCP Registry plus any client marketplaces you want distribution on.

Sources

MCP Registry — accessed 2026-04-20
modelcontextprotocol/servers — accessed 2026-04-20
MCP spec — tools/list and resources/list — accessed 2026-04-20