MCP Inspector (Model Context Protocol Inspector)

For more information about MCP Inspector visit the official site:

https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/inspector/tree/main

1. What is MCP Inspector

The MCP inspector is a developer tool for testing and debugging MCP servers.

The inspector runs both a MCP Client UI (default port 5173) and an MCP proxy Server (default port 3000). Open the client UI in your browser to use the inspector.

2. How to Download the MCP Inspector Github repo

We download the ZIP github repo file

We uncompress the MCP Inspector ZIP file in our local machine

3. How to Open MPC Inspector application with VSCode

We navigate to the MCP Inspector location and we open with VSCode

4. How to Install Packages

We run the following command to intall the packages

npm i 

or

npm install

5. How to Build and Run the MCP Inspector Client

We build and run the application executing the following commands:

npm run build

and

npm start

We confirm the MCP Client is running:

We open the referred web site: http://localhost:5173

6. How to run a MCP Server and Send Requests

For example we are going to connect to the MCP Server provided by this NodeJS package:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/@modelcontextprotocol/server-everything

We can launch and connect to the NodeJS MCP Server from the MCP Inspector Client

Transport Type: STDIO

Command: npx

Arguments: -y @modelcontextprotocol/server-everything

When we are connected to the MCP Server we navigate to the Tools tab

We visualize the available Tools

We select the "echo" tool and we send a command

We receive the echo message response