Support for server.json (the Official MCP Registry format) #922
Description
Hey, all, I'm Rado and I'm one of the maintainers of the MCP Registry 👋
Some of you are probably already aware of this, but we’ve been working on a standardised JSON-based format for describing MCP servers (including metadata, parameters, environment variables, startup commands, etc.) which we usually refer to as the "server.json" format. The flow is MCP authors use it to describe their server and then they publish it to the registry. It was brought up a few times that it would be handy if there's a tool that can help MCP authors test and play around with their server.json before actually publishing it.
The goal of this issue is to explore whether this falls under the roadmap for Inspector and if you would be interested in supporting the format.
Some of the things that this could enable are:
- Schema validation - Ensure that a server definition conforms to the registry's schema.
- Server startup - Allow authors/developers to launch an MCP server directly from a registry-compliant definition.
- Value verification - Help users confirm that the values they’ve entered are correct (e.g., URLs resolve, environment variable are working as expected when set, paths are valid, etc.).
- Improved dev experience - Users authoring registry entries could immediately test them in Inspector without wiring things up manually.
Overall supporting the registry format should help align the MCP ecosystem but also give Inspector users convenient ways to verify MCP server configurations before publishing them.
If this sounds interesting, happy to chat about how we can help move this forward 😃
Cheers and thanks again for the great work on Inspector 🙌
cc: @tadasant @toby @domdomegg