Docs and info about using Context-Server / Model Context Protocol (MCP)? #21455
Replies: 13 comments 21 replies
-
|
Hey all! Still looking for answers on using MCP servers with Zed ... In the docs here ... https://zed.dev/docs/assistant/context-servers It says the config should look like this {
"context_servers": {
"my-context-server": {
"command": {
"path": "/path/to/my-context-server",
"args": ["run"],
"env": {}
},
"settings": {
"enable_something": true
}
}
}
}To test this feature out, I'm trying to use the brave-search API ... I think it would be configured like this:
"context_servers": {
"brave-search": {
"command": {
"path": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "@modelcontextprotocol/server-brave-search"],
"env": {
"BRAVE_API_KEY": "my_api_key here"
}
},
"settings": {}
}
}
}but this doesn't seem to work? Can someone please help? A working example would be great. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Still trying to get this ... Found this example that says it works with zed https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers/tree/main/src/git#usage-with-zed Have tried both of these (pip / uv) and neither works ... pls someone kick me down a working example if this feature is really a real thing |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
My LLM had some choice words about this affair Dear Zed Devs, Space Goat's List of Demands:
Until then, Space Goat will continue to:
Sincerely, P.S. The OG image would have been AMAZING if you'd just updated your docs! |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
oh man those goat sacrifices were really not fun |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
more deets, this is from Space Goat not me. Space Goat: "Look at all these amazing MCP servers I could be using! I could:
|
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Hello, I'm new here, but I admire your persistence on this topic. And, erm, Space Goat's too... 🫠 I also think MCP is a big deal, and zed seems well positioned to make the most of the opportunity. I find it difficult to believe that work on this isn't going full speed ahead. The lack of communication is very disappointing, but let's try and fill that vacuum... I'm game! |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
To be fair to Zed, probably part of the reason it is so amazing is that it stays clean and minimal and rejects many of the crufty "features" and that make VSCode feel sort of junky and slow. No matter what Space Goat says, I don't think goat image generation should be part of Zed! But the clean, minimal "blank page" feeling of Zed make such an ideal interface for LLM operations. I just want a single place where I can code AND have the ongoing, persistent, functional conversations that aren't tied to a single app. This is no small challenge to pull off, and there's probably going to be a lot of mistakes made as thing evolve. I was thinking that maybe the AI assistant panel part of Zed needs to be a separate extension; maybe an open source project in it's own right. If Zed itself had an limited internal API interface that could be operated from the LLM side, this might be a solution. I think that users are going to want a "conversation scroll" that they have with various LLMs to be a service that lives outside of any one app, but it needs to be quickly available to the app. It seems to me that there is a missing piece of tech some sort of "git/github" for ongoing LLM conversations; that data is really valuable and useful ... but it would need to be both quickly available locally and preservable online so it's available for other apps. Another option might be for Zed to implement some sort of "guardian" ai into it's code ... I was looking at Jan.ai's "cortex.cpp" where they have a local model that is the app's homie, while other LLMs can be added when desired. This open source system ai could handle all the tool function calling for zed in a secure, predictable manner, and the other vLLMs could be use for specialized purposes, hard problems, etc ... all the while the full "scroll" dataset would be preserved. Haven't really thought either of these ideas though much, just two ideas that came to mind. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
hmm... trusting an llm as a solution to the problem that you don't trust your other llms... seems circular and therefore shaky at best. wouldn't that be just adding another failure point? now i need to wonder which llm i need to hit with a stick whenever things don't work. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
i would love to hear a response from the zed team. mcp context is a really important feature. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
I got my custom server working with the following in Zed's settings: "context_servers": {
"mcp-pinecone": {
"settings": {},
"command": {
"path": "/Users/nav/.cargo/bin/uv",
"args": [
"--directory",
"~/projects/mcp-pinecone",
"run",
"mcp-pinecone"
]
}
}
} |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
In my testing, prompts for a configured mcp server show up as slash commands |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
"context_servers": {
"rot13": {
"command": {
"path": "/Users/infowolfe/github/zed-industries/python-context-server/venv/bin/python3.12",
"args": [
"/Users/infowolfe/github/zed-industries/python-context-server/examples/rot13.py"
]
},
"settings": {}
}
}This didn't result in me getting a |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
If you want you can use my mcp server that I use and have tested to work with Zed at https://github.com/KorigamiK/markitdown_mcp_server
"context_servers": {
"markitdown_mcp": {
"settings": {},
"command": {
"path": "uv",
"args": [
"--directory",
"/path/to/markitdown_mcp_server",
"run",
"markitdown"
]
}
}
} |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
I downloaded markitdown and followed your config and didn't get the /md prompt |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
nevermind after futzing with it for a minute it started working |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
https://github.com/codegod100/lab/blob/main/context/src/context/server.py |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Hi, any idea why I can not make work any from these Linear.app MCP for zed?
My config: "context_servers": {
"linear-context-server": {
"settings": {},
"command": {
"path": "/Users/oliverkriska/.local/share/mise/installs/node/23.7.0/bin/npx",
"args": ["-y", "linear-mcp-server"],
"env": {
"LINEAR_API_KEY": "<API_KEY>"
}
}
},
"linear": {
"settings": {},
"command": {
"path": "/Users/oliverkriska/.local/share/mise/installs/node/23.7.0/bin/node",
"args": ["/Users/oliverkriska/Projects/linear-mcp/build/index.js"],
"env": {
"LINEAR_API_KEY": "<API_KEY>"
}
}
}
}Logs for first one: but I see this in Assistant panel Second one doesn't show as a prompt at all, this is in logs: |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
MCP Tools are not supported in zed right now. Only prompts work. You need to provide the argument to the prompt if you want to use them in your case. You add an argument by having a space after the slash command and give the message there.
|
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
it's hard to do, when I hit enter to autocomplete that prompt, it shows like I wrote. When I tried to add message there I got this: |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
I'm confused. This is clearly advertised as a feature in the Zed docs. The one (and only) server I wish to use right now is the Github Context Server. I've attempted:
I get nada. No slash commands, and I see no indication that any interaction is even being attempted. Am I missing something obvious? |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
did you check logs? Some people found relevant information there and it helped them resolve it (wrong path, etc..). But for example it has not helped me even when I fixed all errors from logs. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Thanks for responding so quickly, @oliver-kriska :) I've gone a few rounds with the logs. I decided to simplify things (presumably) by installing the GitHub Activity Summarizer (gas) server and getting that to work. After twerking with my gh command line a bit (turns out it's been a while since I'd used it), I can get
Moving on to the main gh mcp, I did find errors in startup, but was able to correct them (I think): After restarting the editor, waiting, creating new chats, etc, I still don't see any reference to the github server in slash commands, nor do I see any errors obviously associated with the server in the log. I'm on |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
@coracoracora I've tried to integrate MCP into Zed recently and I've concluded that you need Zed's Extension wrapping MCP, confirmed also by the #27435 . I also understood that only prompts and resources are supported at the moment. The whole configuration feels "cryptic" to me, but I guess it just needs more time till these things get sorted. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Thanks @lgazo . I'm actually trying to use the GitHub MCP Server mentioned in the Zed Docs, and it looks like it is wrapped, but perhaps I'm missing something. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Hey all - surprised to see this thread is still going ... I thought I read that Zed had MCP support now. I don't have any answers to offer, other than to say as a work around, if you are an Anthropic User, there's Claude code, and OAI is just releasing (or released?) a similar terminal style app called Codex. CC supports MCP tools, and I imagine Codex will too. It's not quite the same as having the assistant in the assistant panel, but maybe close enough? |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Thanks @goodlux , and yeah, I was surprised to see it's been around as long as it has when I posted. To be honest, it's not make or break for me... I was really just curious to exercise these and see what the integration looks like when it works, as I'm considering using the proto for a personal project and, if it worked, Zed would be a convenient testbed for me given I spend so much time in it anyway :) I will keep an eye on things; who knows, maybe I'll get motivated to dig into it and contribute some code at some point, it's least I can do. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Has anyone here tried the mcp server from context7? I have followed the documentation to install context7 from zed extensions and have also done the configuration In the setting.json of zed, but after I tried doing some prompts it seems context7 still doesn't work, Maybe there are those here who have experience using context7 with zed and can share what can be done. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
I just got an email about Zed releasing "Zed Agent" (really soon, days!)
and getting to beta test .... all the MCP servers you could want, so happy
to give this a spin
[image: Screenshot 2025-05-05 at 1.21.20 AM.png]
…On Thu, Apr 24, 2025 at 12:12 PM Cora Middleton ***@***.***> wrote:
Thanks @goodlux <https://github.com/goodlux> , and yeah, I was surprised
to see it's been around as long as it has when I posted. To be honest, it's
not make or break for me... I was really just curious to exercise these and
see what the integration looks like when it works, as I'm considering using
the proto for a personal project and, if it worked, Zed would be a
convenient testbed for me given I spend so much time in it anyway :)
I will keep an eye on things; who knows, maybe I'll get motivated to dig
into it and contribute some code at some point, it's least I can do.
—
Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub
<#21455 (reply in thread)>,
or unsubscribe
<https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAAHYYM343GFHZGAUTAMBJT23EZRZAVCNFSM6AAAAABTGGV6UGVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43URDJONRXK43TNFXW4Q3PNVWWK3TUHMYTEOJTHEYTENI>
.
You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID:
***@***.***>
|
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
Congratulations, I am very much looking forward to the zed agent and zed supporting the MCP server, I really want to use it. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
I use Zed Agent beta preview for couple of weeks. After you have working MCP, it works perfect. There are some bugs but when it will be fixed it's great. But I don't use a lot of complex MCP. Just |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Awesome, this is great to see. I'm not in the beta program (I don't uhhh… think? Maybe I signed up and forgot? Hafta check…). Thanks for the heads up, @huhu415 ! (and say hi to the 415 for me, if in fact that's an area code). |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
Uh oh!
There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.
-
Check for existing issues
Describe the feature
Wishing there were some docs on how to use the tool use and context-server features that seem to have been in the source code for months.
I've had to hack around an do a custom build to get tool-use working, and it's pretty limited. Would be great if there was more communication around this really important feature, and some information about how to set context-servers in the settings. From the docs available ... the messaging feels almost intentionally cryptic.
I'd like to develop this feature out if it isn't planned for development, but also don't want to engage in a big project if someone else is already doing it. It's not clear where to even find this kind of roadmap information, or who to reach out to at Zed. The IRC channel doesn't seem to get much action from devs ... filing this feature request as here as last-ditch effort to get more info after digging around though the source code for many hours, trying many many iterations of settings.
Environment
Mac OS, running the latest build.
If applicable, add mockups / screenshots to help present your vision of the feature
No response
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
All reactions