MCP (Model Context Protocol)

The synaptic_mcp crate connects to external MCP-compatible tool servers, discovers their tools, and exposes them as standard synaptic::core::Tool implementations.

What is MCP?

The Model Context Protocol is an open standard for connecting AI models to external tool servers. An MCP server advertises a set of tools via a JSON-RPC interface. Synaptic's MCP client discovers those tools at connection time and wraps each one as a native Tool that can be used with any agent, graph, or tool executor.

Supported Transports

Transport	Config Struct	Communication
Stdio	`StdioConnection`	Spawn a child process; JSON-RPC over stdin/stdout
SSE	`SseConnection`	HTTP POST with Server-Sent Events for streaming
HTTP	`HttpConnection`	Standard HTTP POST with JSON-RPC

All transports use the same JSON-RPC tools/list method for discovery and tools/call method for invocation.

Quick Start

use std::collections::HashMap;
use synaptic::mcp::{MultiServerMcpClient, McpConnection, StdioConnection};

// Configure a single MCP server
let mut servers = HashMap::new();
servers.insert(
    "my_server".to_string(),
    McpConnection::Stdio(StdioConnection {
        command: "npx".to_string(),
        args: vec!["-y".to_string(), "@my/mcp-server".to_string()],
        env: HashMap::new(),
    }),
);

// Connect and discover tools
let client = MultiServerMcpClient::new(servers);
client.connect().await?;
let tools = client.get_tools().await;

// Use discovered tools with an agent
let agent = create_react_agent(model, tools)?;

Tool Name Prefixing

By default, discovered tool names are prefixed with the server name to avoid collisions (e.g., my_server_search). Disable this with:

let client = MultiServerMcpClient::new(servers).with_prefix(false);

Convenience Function

The load_mcp_tools function combines connect() and get_tools() in a single call:

use synaptic::mcp::load_mcp_tools;

let tools = load_mcp_tools(&client).await?;

Crate Imports

use synaptic::mcp::{
    MultiServerMcpClient,
    McpConnection,
    StdioConnection,
    SseConnection,
    HttpConnection,
    load_mcp_tools,
};

See the individual transport pages for detailed configuration examples.

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