Skip to content
MCP Toolkit

Getting started

The best way to get a feel for the MCP Toolkit is to point the mcpcontract CLI at a real MCP server and generate an MCP Description from it — no project setup required.

Run your first dump

Section titled “Run your first dump”

Install the CLI and extract the capabilities of a live MCP server:

Terminal window
# Install from npm
npm install -g @cisco_open/mcptoolkit-contract


# Extract capabilities from a live MCP server into an MCP Description
mcpcontract dump \
  --transport streamable-http \
  --url https://learn.microsoft.com/api/mcp \
  --format yaml \
  --output ms-learn.yaml

You now have ms-learn.yaml — an MCP Description document describing every tool the server exposes. From here you can validate it, generate documentation, and compare it against other versions.

For the full five-minute walkthrough — including validation, documentation, and comparing versions to detect breaking changes — follow the canonical 101 Tutorial in the mcptoolkit-contract repository.

Explore it in the editor

Section titled “Explore it in the editor”

Prefer to start visually? Open the hosted editor at editor.mcptoolkit.org and paste in the document you just generated. The editor runs entirely in your browser; nothing you type is uploaded to our servers.

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”