Environment variables auto discovery

[daromaj]

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• I have checked that this question would not be more appropriate as an issue in a specific repository
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Question Category

• Protocol Specification
• SDK Usage
• Server Implementation
• General Implementation
• Documentation
• Other

Your Question

Hi All,
If I want to create a generic client it would be great if server could return list of environment variables it requires or supports.
Is there some standard way of approaching this? I have not found any good information about how to get them and I was wondering how others are handling this.
Thank you

[Zhaobudaoyuema]

Are you saying something like this? I'm also just starting to learn about it, and I usually check the GitHub repositories for each MCP service.

[daromaj]

exactly, the idea is that if I'd like to build something similar to https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/tools/inspector then I would be able to prepopulate a list of required environment variables - without having to look at the repository, etc.

[jspahrsummers]

This is something we don't have a great answer for right now, but as part of thinking about an official server registry, we might want to introduce some kind of metadata format that expresses information like this.

[daromaj]

This looks great. Thank you!