MCP Integration

In this tutorial, we will walk you through the process of integrating a Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server into Solace Agent Mesh.

Learn about agents and plugins

You should have an understanding of agents and plugins in the Solace Agent Mesh. For more information, see Agents and Using Plugins.

As an example, you are going to integrate the MCP server-filesystem Server into the Solace Agent Mesh Framework to perform simple filesystem commands.

Setting Up the Environment

You must install Solace Agent Mesh and Solace Mesh Agent (SAM) CLI, and then you'll want to create a new Solace Agent Mesh project.

This project also requires the installation of Node.js and the NPM package manager.

Creating the sam-mcp-server Plugin

You will be using the sam-mcp-server plugin from the solace-agent-mesh-core-plugins repo for this tutorial. This plugin creates an agent that communicates with the MCP Server.

Once you have your project set up, you can add the sam_mcp_server plugin to the project using the following command:

solace-agent-mesh plugin add sam_mcp_server --pip -u git+https://github.com/SolaceLabs/solace-agent-mesh-core-plugins#subdirectory=sam-mcp-server

This plugin requires two environment variables to be set:

• MCP_SERVER_NAME: The name of the MCP Server
• MCP_SERVER_COMMAND: The command used to run the MCP Server

To use the fileserver MCP Server, update your .env file with the following values:

MCP_SERVER_NAME=filesystem
MCP_SERVER_COMMAND=npx -y @modelcontextprotocol/server-filesystem ${HOME}/sandbox

The MCP_SERVER_COMMAND runs the filesystem MCP Server and allows it to manage files in the ${HOME}/sandbox directory.

Next, create the sandbox directory and create a file:

mkdir ${HOME}/sandbox
touch ${HOME}/sandbox/my_file

Finally, add mcp_server to the plugin agents list in the solace-agent-mesh.yaml file:

...
  plugins:

  ...

  - name: sam_mcp_server
    load_unspecified_files: false
    includes_gateway_interface: true
    load:
      agents:
        - mcp_server
      gateways: []
      overwrites: []

   ...

Now, you can build and run the plugin:

sam run -b

For more information, see Solace Agent Mesh CLI.

Testing the Plugin

First, you must retrieve a list of the files from the filesystem.

curl --location 'http://localhost:5050/api/v1/request' \
--header 'Authorization: Bearer None' \
--form 'prompt="List the files on the filesystem."' \
--form 'stream="false"'

The response includes the file you created in a previous step as expected:

{
  "created": 1739378715,
  "id": "restapi-3570a20d-d4a8-4780-946b-5e1ea3b11ee4",
  "response": {
    "content": "Here are the files in the allowed directory:\n```text\n[FILE] my_file\n```",
    "files": []
  },
  "session_id": "3dbd8425-2962-45e1-be2a-ec7f2cd4a09c"
}

Next, create a simple JSON file.

curl --location 'http://localhost:5050/api/v1/request' \
--header 'Authorization: Bearer None' \
--form 'prompt="Create a json file with two mock employees in the allowed directory of the filesystem."' \
--form 'stream="false"'

You will get the following response indicating the requested file was created:

{
  "created": 1739379547,
  "id": "restapi-864e38b0-ebb6-4dcd-85ec-1e325dcbfb00",
  "response": {
    "content": "OK. I have created a json file with two mock employees in the allowed directory of the filesystem. The file is located at `/Users/myuserid/sandbox/employees.json`.",
    "files": []
  },
  "session_id": "e6580943-9a55-4787-a9ca-2bb839725933"
}

To verify that the file exists, run the following command:

cat ${HOME}/sandbox/employees.json

You should see the data for the two mock employees in the JSON file:

[
  {
    "firstName": "John",
    "lastName": "Doe",
    "employeeId": 1
  },
  {
    "firstName": "Jane",
    "lastName": "Smith",
    "employeeId": 2
  }
]