commands

Tools

Tools are for LLMs to request. Claude Sonnet 3.5 intelligently uses run_command. And, initial testing shows promising results with Groq Desktop with MCP and llama4 models. Currently, just one command to rule them all! - run_command - run a command, i.e. hostname or ls -al or echo "hello world" etc - Returns STDOUT and STDERR as text - Optional stdin parameter means your LLM can - pass code in stdin to commands like fish, bash, zsh, python - create files with cat >> foo/bar.txt from the text in stdin > [!WARNING] > Be careful what you ask this server to run! > In Claude Desktop app, use Approve Once (not Allow for This Chat) so you can review each command, use Deny if you don't trust the command. > Permissions are dictated by the user that runs the server. > DO NOT run with sudo.

Video walkthrough Prompts

Prompts are for users to include in chat history, i.e. via Zed's slash commands (in its AI Chat panel) - run_command - generate a prompt message with the command output

Development

Install dependencies:

npm install

Build the server:

npm run build

For development with auto-rebuild:

npm run watch

Installation

To use with Claude Desktop, add the server config: On MacOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json On Windows: %APPDATA%/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json Groq Desktop (beta, macOS) uses ~/Library/Application Support/groq-desktop-app/settings.json

Use the published npm package

Published to npm as mcp-server-commands using this workflow

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mcp-server-commands": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["mcp-server-commands"]
    }
  }
}

Use a local build (repo checkout)

Make sure to run npm run build

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mcp-server-commands": {
      // works b/c of shebang in index.js
      "command": "/path/to/mcp-server-commands/build/index.js"
    }
  }
}

Local Models

• Most models are trained such that they don't think they can run commands for you.
• Sometimes, they use tools w/o hesitation... other times, I have to coax them.
• Use a system prompt or prompt template to instruct that they should follow user requests. Including to use run_commands without double checking.
• Ollama is a great way to run a model locally (w/ Open-WebUI)

ollama pull https://huggingface.co/lmstudio-community/openhands-lm-32b-v0.1-GGUF\n\n# https://ollama.com/library/devstral
ollama pull devstral\n\n# Qwen2.5-Coder has tool use but you have to coax it
ollama pull qwen2.5-coder

HTTP / OpenAPI

The server is implemented with the STDIO transport. For HTTP, use mcpo for an OpenAPI compatible web server interface. This works with Open-WebUI

uvx mcpo --port 3010 --api-key "supersecret" -- npx mcp-server-commands\n\n# uvx runs mcpo => mcpo run npx => npx runs mcp-server-commands\n\n# then, mcpo bridges STDIO HTTP

[!WARNING] > I briefly used mcpo with open-webui, make sure to vet it for security concerns.

Logging

Claude Desktop app writes logs to ~/Library/Logs/Claude/mcp-server-mcp-server-commands.log By default, only important messages are logged (i.e. errors). If you want to see more messages, add --verbose to the args when configuring the server. By the way, logs are written to STDERR because that is what Claude Desktop routes to the log files. In the future, I expect well formatted log messages to be written over the STDIO transport to the MCP client (note: not Claude Desktop app).

Debugging

Since MCP servers communicate over stdio, debugging can be challenging. We recommend using the MCP Inspector, which is available as a package script:

npm run inspector

The Inspector will provide a URL to access debugging tools in your browser.