cli2mcp MCP server

cli2mcp

Status: v0.1 — early release. Stdio transport only. APIs may change before 1.0.

Expose any command-line binary as a Model Context Protocol tool by parsing its --help output and synthesizing a JSON Schema at startup. One command, no boilerplate.

Works with any MCP-compatible client — Claude Desktop, ChatGPT (via OpenAI Agents SDK), Cursor, Gemini CLI, Cline, Windsurf, Continue, Zed, and anything else that speaks the MCP stdio transport.

npx cli2mcp <command>

Why

Writing an MCP server for a CLI you already have is mechanical work: instantiate the SDK, register a tool, hand-write the input schema, marshal arguments, spawn the subprocess, format the output. Roughly 80–150 lines of TypeScript per binary, repeated forever as new tools come out.

cli2mcp does it in one command. The CLI's own --help is the source of truth for the schema — if rg adds a flag tomorrow, the AI sees it tomorrow without code changes.

Install

npm install -g cli2mcp
# or invoke without installing
npx cli2mcp <command>

Requires Node.js 22+.

Configure your MCP client

cli2mcp is launched by your client as a stdio subprocess. Add an entry per CLI you want to expose.

Claude Desktop

Config file location:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ripgrep": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "cli2mcp", "rg", "--name", "ripgrep"]
    },
    "jq": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "cli2mcp", "jq"]
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop after editing.

Other clients

Refer to each client's documentation for the exact config path on your platform — they evolve and are not guaranteed to match the table above.

Quick wins — copy-paste configs

Drop any of these into your client's mcpServers block (paths shown above per client). Each one wraps a popular CLI as an MCP tool an AI can call directly.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.