mcpb

> MCPB It's annoying when acronyms are used without explanation. It's https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/mcpb , which looks a kind of installation bundle for MCP servers.

Author here. mpak is a package manager for MCPB bundles (the standard bundle format for MCP servers). We built this to power our own platform internally and thought it might be useful to the broader community. Most of it is open source. The problem: MCP servers are code, not packages. Every server has different install procedures, runtimes, and configs. Beyond the UX annoyance, this creates real issues: 1. Cold starts: pip install or npm install at runtime kills latency. MCPB vendors dependencies, so startup is just unzip and execute (some of ours were taking 60+ seconds to `npm install`) 2. Non-deterministic builds: Same repo, different day, different behavior. Transitive deps shift. Bundles are immutable artifacts, same SHA = same behavior. 3. Security: You can scan a bundle before running it. Generate SBOMs. Run grype/syft/trivy. Know

I wonder how this works with mcpb (renamed from dxt Desktop extensions): https://github.com/anthropics/mcpb Specifically, it looks like skills are a different structure than mcp, but overlap in what they provide? Skills seem to be just markdown file & then scripts (instead of prompts & tool calls defined in MCP?). Question I have is why would I use one over the other?

Is this only about remote MCP servers? The instructions all seem to contain a URL, but personally almost all the MCP servers I'm running locally are stdio based and not networked. Are you planning to support those in some way? There's also this new effort by Anthropic to provide a packaging system for MCP servers, called MCPB or MCP Bundles[1]. A bundle is a zip file with a manifest inside it, a bit like how Chrome extensions are structured (maybe VSCode extensions too?). Is this something you're looking to integrate with? I can't say I have seen any MCPB files anywhere just yet, but with a focus on simple installs and given that Anthropic introduced MCP in the first place, I wouldn't be surprised if this new format also got some traction. These archives could contain a lot more data than the small amount you're currently encoding in the

Hey Neil, this is cool! If you package it up as a desktop extension (https://github.com/anthropics/dxt) and send it to me (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScHtjkiCNjpqnWtFLIQ...), I'd add it to Claude's directory of local MCP servers!