MCP

The MCP plugin (crustum/mcp) lets AI clients talk to your CakePHP application through the Model Context Protocol: servers expose tools (callable actions), resources (context data), and prompts (reusable templates), and the plugin handles the JSON-RPC transport, session headers, and schema advertisement. This section is the site guide: install, commands, servers, tools, clients, apps, auth. The full protocol reference ships with the crustum/mcp package itself.

Expose a server over HTTP for remote agents, or as a local STDIO process for IDE agents and desktop clients. The same server class can serve both transports. See Servers.

Install

composer require crustum/mcp
bin/cake plugin load Crustum/Mcp
bin/cake manifest install --plugin=Crustum/Mcp

Loading the plugin registers container bindings, console commands, MCP middleware aliases, and the plugin routes used by HTTP servers and OAuth discovery. The manifest step copies config/mcp.php into your application; without it, load the config manually:

public function bootstrap(): void
{
    Configure::load('mcp', 'default');
}

Application configuration lives under the Mcp key:

return [
    'Mcp' => [
        'Servers' => [
            // ['route' => 'mcp/weather', 'server' => WeatherServer::class, 'middleware' => []],
        ],
        'local' => [
            // 'weather' => WeatherServer::class,
        ],
        'base_url' => null,
        'redirect_domains' => [
            '*',
        ],
    ],
];

Web servers register in Mcp.Servers, local STDIO servers in Mcp.local. See Servers. In production set require_web_auth_middleware to true so web servers without a middleware list fail at registration instead of serving open.

Where next

• Commands — scaffold your first server
• MCP tools — using MCP tools inside agents