Previous
About the author
- Albert Skibinski is a freelance full-stack developer en co-founder at Jafix.
- I write about web development, long bike rides and food!
AI MCP Drupal
Exploring the Model Context Protocol (MCP) with Drupal
Albert Skibinski •
In november last year, Anthropic announced the Model Context Protocol (MCP). It currently is getting a lot of momentum so I was curious to see what it's all about and if I can create a quick demo to play around with it.
A lot has already been written explaining what MCP is (I like this article) and you can also read up on the official documentation, but what made it click for me is the problem it solves.
It solves the problem that Ai's do not have to understand each API. They just have to support this protocol and any API just had to create a MCP server, which you can think of as a wrapper around your API. This way any Ai can implement a standard way of tool discovery and leverage their power.
If you have a public API, anyone can create a MCP Server for it. In fact, claude can perfectly create a server for you if you ask it to.
Drupal
In my case, I wanted to see how I can quickly build a MCP Server for the content we have at Jafix, exposing it to Claude desktop. Turns out, some smart folks already created a mcp module. Very beta and under development but exactly what I needed.
The protocol itself works with JSON-RPC 2.0 between the client and the server. The module provides two ways to create a server: either by using the provided binary, which is a custom TS build (github) based on the SDK which suses STDIO. Alternatively you can use Drupal directly as a server using SSE.
I went for the first method because it seems to be a better fit. Using Drupal as a servers would add another layer on top of an already complex system not really designed to do this kind of real-time communications. But it is perfectly suited as a resource store.
After setup, it worked!
Note: there is no official Claude desktop for linux, but this one works on Ubuntu (building it was probably wat took most time).
Possibilities
While this demo with Drupal was not really that useful, MCP really opens up a lot of ways to automate a lot of your workflows. There already are tons of servers available which you can all tie into Claude. And people are building all kinds of cool integrations.
For example, you could use a playwright server who can control a browser and do/get stuff from the web. Or integrate with your Gmail, Calendar, Jira, Github.... The list is long, and the possibilities are endless.
Support
Currently, only a pretty show list of clients support it: Claude desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, Cline.. But that list will undoubtedly grow bigger quickly. And I'm very curious about support from the other big players like OpenAi, Google or Mistral which would be great.
Will it become the standard? There is a lot of momentum currently but there are alternatives (which I was totally unaware of) like SLOP for example. And probably many many more I never heard of. Time will tell!