Overview
MCPSmithy is a single Go binary that reads a declarative YAML config file (
.mcpsmithy.yaml) and serves a fully functional MCP tool server.
Why does it exist?
There are many ways to give an agent domain-specific context. What's harder is knowing which context matters for a given task, without building custom servers or deciding for yourself what's relevant every time.
- Turn any knowledge source into MCP tools — local files, git repos, scraped sites, docs directories, all declared in YAML with no server code. Use it to give agents a map of complex or distributed systems, serve your docs as an MCP server, or define the conventions and structure of any project.
- Zero per-project code — All behaviour comes from YAML config. Works for any stack — Go, Python, TypeScript, Rust, or anything else.
- Works with any model — Frontier models can sometimes infer conventions from context; cheaper ones can't. By making context explicit and tool-accessible, mcpsmithy closes that gap.
- Captures expert context — Conventions encode the knowledge that lives in engineers' heads: which docs govern which paths, what rules apply, and how parts of the system relate.
How it works
- You write a
.mcpsmithy.yamldescribing your project. - You run
mcpsmithy serve(or via Docker). - Your MCP-compatible AI assistant discovers and calls the tools.
Config Overview
| Section | Purpose |
|---|---|
project | Name, description, and content sources |
conventions | Encode expert knowledge: which docs and rules apply to which paths, and how parts of the system relate |
tools | Tools defined as Go templates — call built-in functions or compose them into pipelines, all in config |
The server speaks MCP over JSON-RPC 2.0. It uses stdio by default (the MCP client spawns the binary directly) or HTTP/SSE for Docker and remote deployments.