github-mcp

GitHub v3 REST API MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, generated by mcpify.

Exposes exactly 3 tools — search, get, call — backed by an embedded semantic database (mcp_store.db), so an LLM never needs the full API surface in context.

Install

cargo build --release

This builds three binaries into target/release/: github-mcp (the CLI/server below), github-mcp-populate-embeddings, and github-mcp-healthcheck. Run cargo install --path . instead if you want github-mcp on your PATH so the commands below work without a target/release/ prefix.

Prebuilt binaries for macOS, Linux, and Windows are attached to each GitHub Release, along with a shell/PowerShell installer script.

Or install the published crate directly:

cargo install github-mcp

Setup

cargo run -- setup

Interactively collects the API URL and the credentials your chosen auth method needs, then lets you persist them as a .env file, a local (./github-mcp.config.yml) or global (~/.github-mcp/config.yml) YAML config file, or a ready-to-run CLI invocation.

Supported auth methods: pat (personal access token, sent as a bearer token), apiKey (API key, sent as a header), basic (username/password).

Configuration

See .env.example for the full list of supported variables.

GHES deployments must append /api/v3 to GITHUB_MCP_URL (e.g. https://ghe.example.com/api/v3). api.github.com/GHEC deployments need no suffix — use the bare host (e.g. https://api.github.com).

Usage

Terminal Client (default)

# 1. Semantic search over all 1,206 operations in the default GitHub.com store
github-mcp search "get an issue from a repository"

# 2. Inspect the exact method, path, and input/output schemas before calling
github-mcp get issues/get
# method: GET
# path: /repos/{owner}/{repo}/issues/{issue_number}

# 3. Path parameters are fields in one --args JSON object
github-mcp call issues/get --args '{"owner":"octocat","repo":"Hello-World","issue_number":1347}'

# Request payloads are nested under body in that same object
github-mcp call issues/create --args '{"owner":"octocat","repo":"Hello-World","body":{"title":"Found a bug","body":"The reproduction steps are...","labels":["bug"]}}'

call accepts one JSON object through --args (or -a), not arbitrary per-operation CLI flags. Use get <operationId> to see the accepted field names and which ones are required.

Other subcommands: github-mcp test-connection (verify the configured API URL/credentials are reachable), github-mcp config (print the resolved configuration, secrets redacted), github-mcp version (print the installed version), and github-mcp versions (list the API spec versions this project has a store for).

Harness Server

github-mcp start                              # stdio transport (default)
github-mcp http --host 127.0.0.1 --port 3000  # HTTP transport

Connect an MCP client

stdio: after running github-mcp setup, configure an MCP host to spawn the server. Include the connection settings printed by the wizard:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "github-mcp": {
      "command": "github-mcp",
      "args": ["start"],
      "env": {
        "GITHUB_MCP_URL": "<your target API URL>",
        "GITHUB_MCP_AUTH_METHOD": "pat",
        "GITHUB_MCP_API_VERSION": "gh-2026-03-10",
        "GITHUB_MCP_TRANSPORT": "stdio"
      }
    }
  }
}

Use the absolute executable path if github-mcp is not on the MCP host's PATH. The stdio server reads the connection settings from this env block and uses the credentials saved by setup.

HTTP: every request must carry its own Authorization header — HTTP transport intentionally does not fall back to credentials stored on the server:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "github-mcp": {
      "url": "http://127.0.0.1:3000/mcp",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "<credential value>"
      }
    }
  }
}

Keep the listener on localhost unless you have added appropriate network access controls and TLS in front of it.

Docker

# Stdio: the MCP client launches this one-off process and owns its stdin/stdout pipes
docker compose run --rm -T github-mcp

# HTTP: a long-running network endpoint published on http://localhost:3000
docker compose up github-mcp-http

Run these commands from the repository root. Docker Compose automatically discovers docker-compose.yml; github-mcp and github-mcp-http are service names inside that file, not filenames. Writing docker compose -f docker-compose.yml ... is equivalent, but -f is only needed when the file has another name or location, or when combining multiple Compose files.

Both services read configuration from a local .env file (copy .env.example) and persist credentials and configuration under ~/.github-mcp on the host. For stdio, -T disables pseudo-TTY allocation so MCP JSON-RPC stays on raw stdin/stdout, and --rm removes the one-off container when the client exits.

Stdio is a process transport, not a listening service: the MCP client must start the server and communicate through that exact child process's stdin/stdout. This is useful when an MCP client is configured to launch docker compose run --rm -T github-mcp, in local scripts or CI that directly exchange MCP messages with the process, or in a custom image where your application launches the generated server's start subcommand as a child process. Merely putting the application and server in the same image—or starting the stdio container separately with docker compose up—does not connect their streams. One stdio server process normally serves one client. Use HTTP when independently started applications, multiple clients, another container, or a remote machine need to connect over the network.

Observability & Resilience

Logging

Structured logs go to stderr (never stdout, which is reserved for MCP JSON-RPC frames on stdio transport): JSON by default, pretty-printed automatically when stderr is an interactive TTY (auto-detected — there's no separate flag for this). Level is controlled by GITHUB_MCP_LOG_LEVEL (default info), passed straight through to tracing_subscriber::EnvFilter, so directive syntax works too, e.g.:

GITHUB_MCP_LOG_LEVEL="github_mcp=debug,warn" github-mcp start

Secret redaction exists as a helper (core::sanitizer::sanitize, case-insensitive substring match on keys containing password/token/secret/authorization/apikey/api_key/api-key/credential), but today its only caller is github-mcp config (which prints the resolved config with those fields redacted). Request/response payloads aren't logged at all currently — the only tracing call sites are lifecycle/error events — so there's no in-flight redaction path exercised in normal operation yet.

OpenTelemetry tracing

An OTLP/HTTP trace exporter (core/otel.rs) is built unconditionally at startup; if it fails to build, tracing export is silently skipped — there's no dedicated on/off switch in this app. It's tracing only (no OTel metrics exporter is wired up — see "Metrics" below). Point it at a collector with the OTLP SDK's own standard env vars (not GITHUB_MCP_-prefixed), which opentelemetry-otlp reads directly:

OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=http://otel-collector:4318 github-mcp start

Defaults to http://localhost:4318 if unset. OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_ENDPOINT, OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS, _PROTOCOL, _TIMEOUT, and _COMPRESSION are also honored (standard OTLP conventions).

Metrics

Separate from OTel: GET /metrics (HTTP transport only — not available over stdio) serves a minimal hand-rolled Prometheus-text counter store (http/metrics.rs). Today it only tracks one counter, http_requests_total:

curl http://127.0.0.1:3000/metrics
# http_requests_total 4

Circuit breaker, retries, and rate limiting

Every outbound call to the target API (services/api_client.rs) passes through a rate limiter, then a circuit breaker, then the retry loop:

("Knob" here means an env var or a matching key in github-mcp.config.yml/~/.github-mcp/config.yml//etc/github-mcp/config.yml — see the config cascade in core/config_manager.rs.)

Health checks

GET /healthz (HTTP transport only) reports the status of a ComponentRegistry, refreshed every 30 seconds with a 5-second per-check timeout by a HealthCheckManager — both intervals are hardcoded, not configurable. Today exactly one check is registered, store (can the active mcp_store*.db file be opened), marked critical:

curl http://127.0.0.1:3000/healthz
# {"status":"Healthy","components":1}   # 503 + "Unhealthy" if the critical check is failing

Two related but distinct checks exist:

• github-mcp-healthcheck — the standalone binary wired into the Dockerfile's HEALTHCHECK; it only checks that the active store file exists and is readable on disk, and does not talk to a running server or /healthz.
• github-mcp test-connection — an on-demand CLI check that the target API itself is reachable with the configured credentials; unrelated to the periodic /healthz checks above.

Credential storage

github-mcp setup writes credentials straight to the OS-native secret store via the keyring crate (macOS Keychain / Windows Credential Manager / Linux Secret Service), under service github-mcp, account active-credentials. If no OS keychain backend is available (e.g. no D-Bus secret-service daemon in a minimal container), it falls back automatically to an AES-256-GCM-encrypted file at ~/.github-mcp/credentials.enc (0600, parent dir 0700 on Unix); the key is derived from $HOME plus the service name, so that file isn't portable to another machine.

The GITHUB_MCP_TOKEN/GITHUB_MCP_API_KEY (for token/API-key auth) and GITHUB_MCP_USERNAME/GITHUB_MCP_PASSWORD (for basic auth) env vars documented in .env.example are read directly by AuthManager::credentials() and take priority over the stored keychain/file credentials — useful for supplying credentials purely via environment (e.g. in a container) without ever running setup.

Credentials are never persisted into the .env/config-file output of setup itself; those files only carry non-secret settings, with credentials always going through the keychain/encrypted-file path.

Testing

cargo test

Coverage

bash scripts/coverage.sh   # generates HTML and fails below 85% production-line coverage

The 85% gate counts executable production lines under src/ and removes inline #[cfg(test)] module bodies from the LCOV denominator, so adding test code cannot inflate the result. The unfiltered annotated HTML remains useful for line-by-line analysis at target/coverage/html/index.html; the gate's machine-readable input is target/coverage/production-lcov.info. The command requires Python 3, cargo-llvm-cov, and the llvm-tools-preview Rust component.

Profiling

bash scripts/profile.sh        # clean CPU profiling via samply
bash scripts/profile-heap.sh   # steady-state heap profiling via dhat-rs

CPU and heap profiling use separate builds: scripts/profile.sh deliberately profiles normal release binaries so DHAT allocation tracking cannot distort CPU samples, while scripts/profile-heap.sh starts DHAT collection only after its warmup search. CPU profiling records profile/cold-start.json.gz from a one-shot CLI search, then attaches to an already-initialized search harness and records profile/warm-search.json.gz; this keeps model initialization from being mistaken for steady-state request cost. Heap profiling defaults to 1 warmup and 5 measured searches, configurable with PROFILE_HEAP_WARMUPS, PROFILE_HEAP_ITERATIONS, and PROFILE_QUERY. Both scripts supply harmless URL/auth defaults when a generated checkout has not been configured because catalog search never calls the generated API. profile/bottleneck-report.md ranks coverage gaps and shows separate cold and warm CPU summaries. Requires samply (cargo install samply).

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Generated by mcpify — do not hand-edit generated files; re-run mcpify against an updated OpenAPI spec instead.