MCP Integration — Servers, Transports, Scopes

~18 min · mcp, model-context-protocol, integrations

Level 0🌱 Novice

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Plug Claude into the rest of your stack

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the open standard for giving an agent capabilities beyond its built-in tools. An MCP server exposes a function set; Claude calls those functions like any tool. The result: Claude can query Sentry for live errors, post Slack messages, read Notion pages, run a Postgres query, or talk to any of 1,800+ servers in the public ecosystem.

Transports: stdio spawns a local process (best for tools needing your filesystem), HTTP / Streamable HTTP talks to a remote URL (the recommended path for SaaS — 2025-06-18 spec), SSE is the legacy remote transport (deprecated, but you'll see it in older configs).

Scopes: local (default, this project, stored in ~/.claude.json), project (committed to .mcp.json, shared with the team), user (across all your projects). Pick scope by who else needs the connector.

Code

Add three useful servers·bash

# Sentry (read your live errors during a debugging session)
claude mcp add --transport http sentry https://mcp.sentry.dev/mcp

# GitHub (PR reviews, issue creation, code search)
claude mcp add --transport http github https://api.githubcopilot.com/mcp/

# Local Postgres (read-only analytics)
claude mcp add --transport stdio analytics-db -- \
  npx -y @bytebase/dbhub --dsn "postgresql://readonly:pw@localhost:5432/analytics"

# After adding, authenticate OAuth ones from inside Claude Code:
/mcp

Project-scoped .mcp.json (commit this)·json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "sentry":  { "type": "http", "url": "https://mcp.sentry.dev/mcp" },
    "github":  { "type": "http", "url": "https://api.githubcopilot.com/mcp/" },
    "linear":  { "type": "http", "url": "https://mcp.linear.app/mcp" },
    "local-db": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@bytebase/dbhub", "--dsn", "${DATABASE_URL}"],
      "env": {}
    }
  }
}

External links

Exercise

Add at least two MCP servers to a real project: one external (Sentry, GitHub, or Linear) and one local stdio server (your DB or filesystem). Commit a .mcp.json. From a Claude session, ask the agent to use both connectors in a single task.

Progress

Progress is local-only — sign in to sync across devices.

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