Build an MCP Server (Official Tutorial)

The official Model Context Protocol quickstart walks you from an empty directory to a working MCP server connected to Claude for Desktop. The worked example is a weather server exposing two tools, get_alerts and get_forecast, backed by the US National Weather Service API — small enough to finish in one sitting, real enough that the tools return live data. The page opens by naming the three server capability types MCP defines, resources, tools and prompts, and states plainly that this tutorial focuses on tools. From there the content is tabbed across eight languages — Python, TypeScript, Java, Kotlin, C#, Ruby, Rust and Go — each with its own prerequisite list, environment setup, SDK install, complete server source and host configuration steps. A shared section on logging in MCP servers covers the stdio transport rule that trips up nearly every first server: anything written to stdout corrupts the JSON-RPC stream, so logs must go to stderr. The tutorial closes with a command-level test pass, a 'What's happening under the hood' explanation of how a request travels between host, client and server, a troubleshooting section for Claude Desktop config and server startup failures, and next steps toward building a client. Complete runnable code lives in the separate modelcontextprotocol/quickstart-resources repository, which carries weather servers and matching clients in Python, TypeScript, Go, Rust and Ruby.

Topic

MCP

Level

Beginner

Format

Tutorial

Cost

Free

Duration

~45-60 minutes, self-paced

Provider

Model Context Protocol

Hands-on

Yes — code/exercises

Certificate

None

• ✓Scaffold an MCP server project and install the SDK for your language
• ✓Define tools with typed arguments and descriptions the model can read
• ✓Call an external HTTP API inside a tool and format the result
• ✓Register your server with Claude for Desktop through its JSON config
• ✓Keep logs on stderr so stdio JSON-RPC framing is not corrupted
• ✓Trace the request flow between host, client and server when a tool fires
• ✓Debug a server that never appears or fails to start in the host

• •Eight language tabs — Python, TypeScript, Java, Kotlin, C#, Ruby, Rust and Go — from one canonical tutorial
• •Maintained alongside the protocol spec itself, so it tracks spec revisions instead of lagging them
• •Complete code lives in a separate runnable repo (modelcontextprotocol/quickstart-resources, 1.2k stars), not as fragments in prose
• •Deliberately scoped to tools rather than cramming resources and prompts into the same pass
• •Honest about its own limits: the example repo says the samples are intentionally minimal and need auth, CORS allowlists and rate limiting before any network deployment

This page was written from 2 sources, 1 on domains other than modelcontextprotocol.io.

1. 1.modelcontextprotocol.io — build servervendor
2. 2.github.com — quickstart resources