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Setting Up Your Development Environment

Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server Engineering

Environment Setup

To build an MCP server, we need a modern development stack. We will use TypeScript and Node.js for its robust type safety.

Prerequisites

  • Node.js (v18 or higher)
  • npm or yarn
  • A code editor (VS Code recommended)
  • An MCP Host (like Claude Desktop or the MCP Inspector)

Initializing the Project

bash mkdir my-mcp-server cd my-mcp-server npm init -y npm install @modelcontextprotocol/sdk zod npm install -D typescript @types/node npx tsc --init

Assignment: Initialize your folder and verify that you can run tsc --version.