MCP Server Extensions

We plan to deprecate MCP server extensions in favor of the official MCP registry. To keep your MCP server available in Zed, publish it to the official registry as well. Follow our deprecation progress in the tracking issue.

Model Context Protocol servers can be exposed as extensions for use in the Agent Panel.

Defining MCP Extensions

A given extension may provide one or more MCP servers. Each MCP server must be registered in the extension.toml:

[context_servers.my-context-server]

Then, in the Rust code for your extension, implement the context_server_command method on your extension:

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
impl zed::Extension for MyExtension {
    fn context_server_command(
        &mut self,
        context_server_id: &ContextServerId,
        project: &zed::Project,
    ) -> Result<zed::Command> {
        Ok(zed::Command {
            command: get_path_to_context_server_executable()?,
            args: get_args_for_context_server()?,
            env: get_env_for_context_server()?,
        })
    }
}
}

This method should return the command to start up an MCP server, along with any arguments or environment variables necessary for it to function.

If you need to download the MCP server from an external source (GitHub Releases, npm, etc.), you can also do that in this function.

Note that this is only intended currently for servers published either as binaries or via NPM. Remote context servers should be added natively via the UI, see the relevant section in the MCP documentation.

Available Extensions

See MCP servers published as extensions on Zed's site.

Review their repositories to see common implementation patterns and structure.

Testing

To test your new MCP server extension, you can install it as a dev extension.