CLI MCP Server for Command Line Operations

Tools

Tools are for LLMs to request. Claude Sonnet 3.5 intelligently uses run_command. And, initial testing shows promising results with Groq Desktop with MCP and llama4 models.

Currently, just one command to rule them all!

run_command - run a command, i.e. hostname or ls -al or echo "hello world" etc
- Returns STDOUT and STDERR as text
- Optional stdin parameter means your LLM can
  - pass code in stdin to commands like fish, bash, zsh, python
  - create files with cat >> foo/bar.txt from the text in stdin

[!WARNING] Be careful what you ask this server to run! In Claude Desktop app, use Approve Once (not Allow for This Chat) so you can review each command, use Deny if you don't trust the command. Permissions are dictated by the user that runs the server. DO NOT run with sudo.

Video walkthrough

Prompts

Prompts are for users to include in chat history, i.e. via Zed's slash commands (in its AI Chat panel)

run_command - generate a prompt message with the command output

Development

Install dependencies:

npm install

Build the server:

npm run build

For development with auto-rebuild:

npm run watch

Installation

To use with Claude Desktop, add the server config:

On MacOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json On Windows: %APPDATA%/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

Groq Desktop (beta, macOS) uses ~/Library/Application Support/groq-desktop-app/settings.json

Use the published npm package

Published to npm as mcp-server-commands using this workflow

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mcp-server-commands": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["mcp-server-commands"]
    }
  }
}

Use a local build (repo checkout)

Make sure to run npm run build

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mcp-server-commands": {
      // works b/c of shebang in index.js
      "command": "/path/to/mcp-server-commands/build/index.js"
    }
  }
}

Logging

Claude Desktop app writes logs to ~/Library/Logs/Claude/mcp-server-mcp-server-commands.log

By default, only important messages are logged (i.e. errors). If you want to see more messages, add --verbose to the args when configuring the server.

By the way, logs are written to STDERR because that is what Claude Desktop routes to the log files. In the future, I expect well formatted log messages to be written over the STDIO transport to the MCP client (note: not Claude Desktop app).

Debugging

Since MCP servers communicate over stdio, debugging can be challenging. We recommend using the MCP Inspector, which is available as a package script:

npm run inspector

The Inspector will provide a URL to access debugging tools in your browser.

Command Runner