Xojo IDE Control MCP server

xojo-mcp

An MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that gives AI assistants direct control over the Xojo IDE. Communicates via stdin/stdout JSON-RPC and forwards IDE commands via a Unix domain socket to the running Xojo IDE process.

Note on the name. This crate was previously published as xmcp. It was

renamed to xojo-mcp to avoid confusion with X's (formerly Twitter)

unrelated xmcp framework. The installed binary is still xmcp, so

existing configs keep working.

macOS only. xojo-mcp talks to the Xojo IDE over a Unix domain socket

(/tmp/XojoIDE, or /tmp/$XOJO_IPCPATH — see

Choosing which IDE to talk to). Windows is

not supported and there is no plan to add it. The reason is not that the IDE

lacks an IPC mechanism there: Xojo's IPCSocket is a framework abstraction,

and on Windows it is a localhost TCP socket whose port is derived from the path

string rather than a filesystem entry. The original

XMCP, being itself a Xojo application, gets

that transport for free from the framework; this port speaks the wire protocol

directly, so Windows would mean reverse-engineering an undocumented

path-to-port derivation. Linux is untested rather than ruled out — it uses a

Unix socket as macOS does, but the debug- and system-log tools read macOS-only

sources.

Attribution

This is a Rust port of XMCP by Øjvind Søgaard Andersen, originally written in Xojo. The original project is licensed under the MIT License.

Quick start

1. Install

Option A: prebuilt binary (Apple Silicon)

Each release carries an aarch64-apple-darwin tarball that is signed with a Developer ID certificate, notarized by Apple, and accompanied by a detached minisign signature. Grab the latest from Releases, check it, and put the binary on your PATH:

minisign -Vm xmcp-*-aarch64-apple-darwin.tar.gz \
    -P RWR7Jy43Mphvu+jrP2FynfYpR7WdP0PvQaSFKfXub7q9Sh7fjtyAX9GU
tar xzf xmcp-*-aarch64-apple-darwin.tar.gz
install -m 755 xmcp-*/xmcp ~/.cargo/bin/xmcp

The .minisig is the check worth doing, and the one the .sha256 beside it cannot do: a checksum file hosted next to the file it vouches for proves only that the download wasn't corrupted, since anyone able to replace one asset can replace both. The signature is made by a key that never touches the release server — the one in the command above, kept in this repository as minisign.pub.

minisign is in MacPorts (port install minisign). A successful verify prints the trusted comment, which names the version and the date it was signed. The .sha256 is still published for anyone who wants it:

shasum -a 256 -c xmcp-*-aarch64-apple-darwin.tar.gz.sha256

The binary is signed with a Developer ID certificate and notarized by Apple, so Gatekeeper lets it run as-is. Check that for yourself if you like:

codesign -dvv ~/.cargo/bin/xmcp   # Authority: Developer ID Application …
codesign -vvv -R="notarized" --check-notarization ~/.cargo/bin/xmcp

(spctl is the obvious thing to reach for and the wrong tool here: it answers does not seem to be an app for any plain command-line binary, notarized or not.)

A notarization ticket cannot be stapled to a bare executable — stapler only handles .app, .dmg and .pkg — so the first run needs to reach Apple to resolve the ticket. If that first run has to happen offline, clear the quarantine flag by hand instead:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine ~/.cargo/bin/xmcp

Intel Macs are not covered — build from source instead.

Option B: from crates.io

cargo install xojo-mcp

The crate is xojo-mcp; the binary it installs is xmcp.

Option C: from source

git clone https://codeberg.org/brechanbech/xojo-mcp.git
cd xojo-mcp
cargo install --path .

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.