mcp-tap

🎯 Why?

MCP servers are exploding in popularity (tradingview-mcp, OmniRoute, etc.) but developers have no quick way to test them from the CLI. The official MCP Inspector is a web UI that requires browser setup, and every other option means configuring a full AI client like Claude or Cursor just to verify a single tool call. mcp-tap fills this gap with a zero-config CLI that speaks the MCP JSON-RPC protocol directly over stdio.

Target audience: MCP server developers, AI agent builders, and DevOps engineers who need to quickly test, debug, and health-check MCP servers during development without launching a full AI client.

✨ Features

• ✨ List all tools/resources/prompts exposed by any stdio-based MCP server
• ✨ Call any tool with JSON arguments and get formatted results instantly
• ✨ Ping/health-check an MCP server with latency measurement
• ✨ Rich terminal output with syntax-highlighted JSON and formatted tables

🚀 Quick Start

# Install
pip install mcp-tap

# Run
mcp-tap --help

📦 Installation

From Source

git clone https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/mcp-tap.git
cd mcp-tap

# Create virtual environment
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate  # Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate

# Install in development mode
pip install -e ".[dev]"

# Run tests
pytest -v

🎬 Demo

The GIF above was recorded using Charm VHS:

vhs < demo.tape

📖 Usage

# Show help
mcp-tap --help

# Common usage examples
mcp-tap --example

🏗️ Architecture

graph LR
    A[Input] --> B[Core Engine]
    B --> C[Output]
    B --> D[Plugins]
    D --> E[Extensions]

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please:

1. Fork the repo
2. Create a feature branch (git checkout -b feature/amazing-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -m 'Add amazing feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin feature/amazing-feature)
5. Open a Pull Request

📄 License

MIT © 2026 — See LICENSE for details.