MCP tools add-on

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Have anyone already thought about hosting a collection of MCP tools on Home Assistant as an add-on.
Typically the mcp servers are very lightweight and support SSE or http_stream. So instead of always starting the local mcp tool, the tool could be hosted on HA and all this MCP tools would be available for VSCode and for sure also for HA itself.
What are your thoughts?

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I think I’m probably out if my depth answering here, however what would be the main difference between hosting it on a (local) server vs on HA? As long as it is reachable from HA, it doesn’t make much difference as to ware it is being run.

However if we assume that not everyone has a self-hosted server or something, then I think it would be a great addon to run on HA as an add-on.

Also, take a look at this thread, I think kotrfa might have a more educated opinion.

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I think it’s a fantastic idea actually…

A general purpose sse mcp box that has a bunch of assorted tools like search and scrape?

Would sure facilitate adoption of local llm.

Cons: currently those that llm have the know how to build/self host an mcp tools server…

Pros. It’s something that screams make once share many and if pushed into a HA addon could make it easy for new to LLM to have a better first experience. …Because at some point it won’t just be geeks like me.

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Thanks for pinging. However, I don’t think I have :thinking: .

I don’t see MCP tools being hosted on homeassistant server somehow a huge win. MCP servers have been built so you don’t need a dedicated server, i.e. you add a config into your setup and use something like uvx or npx as a runner on the local machine, e.g. Claude desktop runs it on demand when you need it (as opposed having to run it always when it would be on an actual server). Sure, you can call remote MCP servers like the HA MCP, but then I don’t see much of a difference from having a local tool calling an API of whatever service you want from within an MCP server (you still need an authentication).

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I just made an account to say i would like an addon with various mcp, just like docker mcp toolkit , would be nice since i run a rasbery pi to not need a computer running only for docker mcp toolkit. I searched the web for such addons but didn’t find anything it would add a nice addition to the n8n addon to use multiple mcp servers.

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Thanks all for the great feedback!

@kotrfa Agree that local hosting is easy to do, but just connecting to MCP server that are always available via HA would be even more convenient (personal preference).
@Andrei88 I like the docker mcp toolkit, that also makes it very convenient, but would be only available for my local machine where I’ve hosted it.
So @NathanCu I think SSE or streamable http is a must
Most of the mcp server are stdio so I wonder if using GitHub - sparfenyuk/mcp-proxy: A bridge between Streamable HTTP and stdio MCP transports would be a good approach to make these available

I’m currently thinking on two questions:

  • What’s the best architectures to set this up? e.g. mcp-proxy with SSE-to-stdio
  • Which mcp servers should be targeted?
    e.g. github, arxiv,
  • How manage them? - 1 addon vs multiple