We built an Open MCP Client to chat with any MCP server, self hosted and open source! (github.com)
from nate4t@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 09 Apr 17:45
https://lemmy.world/post/27990489

Hey, selfhosters! 👋

I’m part of the team at CopilotKit that just launched the Open MCP Client (github.com/CopilotKit/open-mcp-client), a fully self-hosted implementation of the Model Control Protocol.

For those unfamiliar, CopilotKit is a self-hostable, full-stack framework for building user interactive agents and copilots… Our focus is allowing your agents to take control of your application (by human approval), communicate what it’s doing, and generate a completely custom UI for the user.

What’s Open MCP Client?

It’s a web-based, open source client that lets you chat with any MCP server in your own app. All you need is a URL from Composio to get started. We hacked this together over a weekend using Cursor, and thrilled with how it turned out.

Here’s what we built:

• The First Web-Based MCP Client: You can try it out right now here!An Open-Source Client: Embed it into any app—check out the github.com/CopilotKit/open-mcp-client.
• An Open-Source Client: Embed it into any app—check out the repo listed above.

How It Works

We used CopilotKit for the client and interactivity layer, paired with a 40-line LangChain LangGraph ReAct agent to handle MCP calls.

This setup allows you to connect to MCP servers (which act like a universal connector for AI models to tools and data-think USB-C but for AI) and interact with them.

A Key Point About CopilotKit: One thing to note is that CopilotKit wraps the entire app, giving the agent context of both the chat and the user interface to take actions on your behalf. For example, if you want to update a spreadsheet or calendar, even modify UI elements-this is possible all while you chat. This makes the assistant feel more like a colleague, rather than just a bolted on chatbot.

Real World Use Case for MCP

Let’s say you’re building a personal productivity app and want your own AI assistant to manage your calendar, pull in weather updates, and even search the web-all in one chat interface. With Open MCP Client, you can connect to MCP servers for each of these tasks (like Google Calendar, etc.). You just grab the server URLs from Composio, plug them into the client, and start chatting. For example, you could type, “Schedule meeting for tomorrow at X time, but only if it’s not raining,” and the AI assisted app will coordinate across those servers to check the weather, find a free slot, and book it-all without juggling multiple APIs or tools manually.

What’s Next?

We’re already hearing some great feedback-like ideas for auth integration and ways to expose this to server-side agents.

• How would you use an MCP client in your project?
• What features would make this more useful for you?
• Is anyone else playing around with MCP servers?

#selfhosted