AI Agents with MCP

Chapter 5. Building MCP Servers: Providing Tools, Prompts and Resources to Applications

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.

This will be the 5th chapter of the final book. Supplemental material (code examples, exercises, etc.) is available for download at https://github.com/kylestratis/ai_agents_mcp_examples

If you’d like to be actively involved in reviewing and commenting on this draft, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

On the other side of the MCP equation from the client is the server. In Chapter 3, the client examples all made use of a server that gave their host application the ability to do math. This server was pre-built and was run locally. In this chapter, our examples will show the construction of this same server from scratch, including all of the primitives and features that servers can provide to clients and their host applications.

Note

In the client chapters, we talked about host applications from the perspective of the client. Now that we are building servers, we will take the point of view of the server, for whom clients and their host applications are inseparable. For these chapters, we will refer to them collectively as client applications or just clients.

We will begin with a high-level view of the server, including what servers ...