Ignite UI MCP Server README

Ignite UI CLI

Quickly create projects, including Ignite UI for Angular and Ignite UI for Web Components, for a variety of frameworks.

Overview

Features:

• Create project structure
• Add views with Ignite UI components (e.g. Combo, Grid or Chart)
• Add scenario based templates with multiple components (e.g. a dashboard)
• Build and install npm packages
• Select a theme, support for custom themes coming soon
• Step by step guide

Supported frameworks

• Angular
• React
• Web Components
• Blazor
• jQuery

Prerequisites

The repository houses multiple packages and orchestrates building and publishing them with lerna and yarn workspaces.

In order to build the repository locally, you need to have yarn installed on your machine. For installation instructions, please visit their official page

Packages

This monorepo contains several packages that combine into the igniteui-cli:

Table of Contents

• Installation
• Usage
  • Step by step
  • List available commands
  • Generating Projects and adding components
    • Generate Ignite UI for Angular project
    • Generate Ignite UI for React project
    • Adding components
  • Build and run
• Configure AI Tooling
• MCP Server
  • Using with AI Assistants
  • Testing with MCP Inspector
• Schematics
  • Schematic Definitions
• Contribution

Installation

Install the npm package as a global module:

npm install -g igniteui-cli

Usage

The main entry point is igniteui and is also aliased as ig. Both can be used interchangeably to call available commands. Check out our Wiki documentation for more details.

Step by step

To get a guided experience through the available options, simply run:

ig

Upon creation, project will be automatically loaded in the default browser. NOTE: If that doesn't happen the port may be already in use. Ports vary for different project types, see the description for the ig start command for details on default ports.

List the available commands.

ig help

Generating projects and adding components

Create a new project passing name, framework and style theme.

ig new <project name> --framework=<framework> --type=<proj-type> --theme=<theme>

This will create the project and will install the needed dependencies.

Parameters besides name are optional. Framework defaults to "angular", project type defaults to the first available in the framework and theme to the first available for the project. For more information visit ig new Wiki page.

Generate Ignite UI for Angular project

To create a new project with Ignite UI for Angular use ig new by specifying angular as framework, and optionally igx-ts as project type and selecting one of the project templates:

ig new "IG Project" --framework=angular --type=igx-ts --template=side-nav

Generate Ignite UI for React project

To create a new project with Ignite UI for React use ig new by specifying react as framework and igr-ts as project type:

ig new "IG Project" --framework=react --type=igr-ts

Generate Ignite UI for Web Components project

To create a new project with Ignite UI for Web Components use ig new by specifying webcomponents as framework:

ig new "IG Project" --framework=webcomponents

Adding components

Once you have created a project, at any point you can add additional component templates using ig add. Running the command without parameters will guide you through the available templates:

ig add

Add a new component or template to the project passing component ID and choosing a name.

ig add <component/template> <component_name>

The ID matches either a component ("grid", "combo", "text-editor", etc) or a predefined template. Predefined templates are framework/project specific and can provide predefined views with either multiple components or fulfilling a specific use case like "form-validation", "master-detail" and so on.

For full list of supported templates in the current project you can simply run ig list command:

ig list

Build and run

ig build
ig start

Configure AI Tooling

Ignite UI provides rich AI assisted development toolchain. To configure Ignite UI AI tooling — MCP servers and AI coding skills — run:

ig ai-config

You will be prompted with two selections:

• AI agents — which tools to generate skill and instruction files for (Generic and Claude are selected by default)
• Coding assistants — which assistants to configure MCP servers for (general .mcp.json is selected by default, compatible with Claude Code, VS Code, and others)

You can also pass options directly:

ig ai-config --agents claude copilot generic --assistants vscode cursor

This creates or updates the assistant-specific MCP config file (e.g. .mcp.json, .vscode/mcp.json, .cursor/mcp.json) with entries for the Ignite UI MCP and igniteui-theming MCP servers (existing servers are preserved), copies AI coding skill files from installed Ignite UI packages, and generates agent-specific instruction files (e.g. CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md).

The ig new command also prompts for AI tool configuration as part of project creation.

MCP Server

The CLI includes a bundled MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that provides AI assistants with Ignite UI documentation search, API reference lookup, and scaffolding guidance for Angular, React, Blazor, and Web Components.

Start the MCP server:

ig mcp

The server runs over stdio and supports the following options:

ig mcp --remote <url>   # Use a remote backend instead of the local SQLite database
ig mcp --debug          # Enable debug logging to mcp-server.log

Using with AI Assistants

For VS Code, the ig ai-config command handles configuration automatically (see above). For other MCP clients (e.g., Claude Desktop, Cursor), configure them manually:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "igniteui-cli": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "igniteui-cli", "mcp"]
    },
    "igniteui-theming": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "igniteui-theming", "igniteui-theming-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

The MCP server exposes the following tools to AI assistants:

Testing with MCP Inspector

To interactively test and debug the MCP server tools:

npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector ig mcp

Schematics

You can also add Ignite UI for Angular components to your projects by using the igniteui/angular-schematics package. It included schematic definitions for most of the logic present in the igniteui-cli. These can be called in any existing Angular project or even when creating one. You can learn more about the schematics package on from its readme.

Contribution

See the Contribution guide to get started.

Run locally

1. Clone the repository

2. Install dependencies with yarn install

3. Build the MCP server and bundle it into the CLI:

   bash

   Copy

   cd packages/igniteui-mcp/igniteui-doc-mcp
   npm install
   npm run build
   cd ../../..
   npm run build:mcp
   

4. Build the monorepo packages: npm run build

5. Open in Visual Studio Code

   There is a predefined launch.config file for VS Code in the root folder, so you can use VS Code View/Debug window and choose one of the predefined actions. These include launching the step by step guide, create new project for a particular framework or add components.

6. Hit Start Debugging/F5

Template smoke test

scripts/smoke-test.sh drives the locally built CLI end to end: it scaffolds a project, adds every component template into it, installs, and builds. The Jasmine specs under spec/ stub out PackageManager.installPackages, so they verify that files land on disk but never that the result installs or compiles — this script covers that gap.

npm run build                 # required: the script runs your local build, not the published CLI
scripts/smoke-test.sh         # angular, react and webcomponents (~20-30 min)

Options:

scripts/smoke-test.sh -f angular --templates grid,combo    # quick check, ~2 min
scripts/smoke-test.sh -f angular --all-projects            # every Angular project template
scripts/smoke-test.sh -f webcomponents --isolate           # bisect which template broke

Per-step logs land in <out>/logs/, and <out>/results.tsv is a machine-readable framework / step / template / status / seconds table. The script exits non-zero if any step failed and prints a summary of the failures.

The work directory is deleted and recreated on every run, so the script refuses to touch anything it cannot show is its own: the filesystem root, your home directory, the repository or any directory containing it, and any non-empty directory that lacks either the .smoke-test-workdir sentinel it drops or the results.tsv of an earlier run. Point --out elsewhere, or remove the directory yourself, if you hit that.

Two things to know if you modify it:

• All ig calls must happen before npm install. packages/cli/bin/execute.js delegates to node_modules/igniteui-cli whenever one resolves inside the current directory, and every project template lists igniteui-cli as a devDependency — so once a generated project has been installed, ig add silently switches to the published CLI and its bundled templates. Scaffolding with --skip-install keeps PackageManager.queuePackage from spawning installs, so dependencies are written to package.json and installed once at the end.
• Exit codes are not sufficient. Util.error logs and returns without setting one, so ig add does-not-exist x exits 0. Each step is judged on its exit code and an error scan of its log and an artifact check.

jQuery and Blazor are opt-in via -f. jQuery has no build script and 13 of its templates pull ignite-ui-full from the Infragistics ProGet feed, which needs credentials; Blazor needs the .NET SDK and has no component templates, so only dotnet build runs.

MCP Server development

The MCP server at packages/igniteui-mcp/igniteui-doc-mcp has its own build pipeline, separate from the monorepo. It uses ESM (ES2022, Node16 modules) while the rest of the monorepo uses CommonJS. See DEVELOPMENT.md for the full MCP server development guide.

Build the MCP server:

cd packages/igniteui-mcp/igniteui-doc-mcp
npm install          # Install MCP-specific dependencies (separate from yarn workspaces)
npm run build        # Compile TypeScript + copy SQLite DB to dist/

Build API reference documentation:

The MCP server includes API reference docs for Angular, React, and Web Components. Angular and Web Components docs are generated from framework submodules via TypeDoc (submodules are auto-initialized by the build scripts). React uses a pre-built TypeDoc JSON model checked into git.

cd packages/igniteui-mcp/igniteui-doc-mcp
npm run build:docs:angular         # Angular: init submodule → TypeDoc → markdown + index.json
npm run build:docs:webcomponents   # Web Components: init submodule → build lib → TypeDoc → markdown + index.json
npm run build:docs:all             # Build both

Note: Web Components requires a one-time library build (npm run build:publish in the submodule) before TypeDoc can run. The build script handles this automatically.

Build MCP server (from the repo root):

npm run build:mcp    # Compiles MCP server TypeScript and copies SQLite DB into dist/

Test the MCP server locally:

npm run build:mcp
npm run build
node packages/cli/lib/cli.js mcp          # Start via CLI
# or directly:
node packages/cli/mcp/dist/index.js       # Start the bundled server

Building CLI package with bundled MCP server

The CLI package includes the MCP server as a bundled build artifact (not an npm dependency). To produce a complete CLI package with full MCP functionality, follow these steps:

# 1. Install monorepo dependencies
yarn install

# 2. Build the MCP server
cd packages/igniteui-mcp/igniteui-doc-mcp
npm install
npm run build                              # Compile TypeScript + copy SQLite DB

# 3. Build API reference docs (optional but recommended for full functionality)
npm run build:docs:all                     # Init submodules + generate Angular + WC API docs via TypeDoc

# 4. Bundle MCP into CLI (from repo root)
cd ../../..
npm run build:mcp                      # Build MCP server

# 5. Build all packages for publishing
npm run build-pack

After step 5, npm pack from the repo root or packages/cli/ will produce a tarball with the MCP server, documentation database, and API reference docs all included.

Skipping API docs: If you skip step 3, the MCP server will still work for list_components, get_doc, search_docs, and get_project_setup_guide tools using the bundled SQLite database. Only the get_api_reference and search_api tools require API docs.

Data Collection

The Ignite UI CLI tool uses Google Analytics to anonymously report feature usage statistics and basic crash reports. This data is used to help improve the Ignite UI CLI tools over time. You can opt out of analytics before any data is sent by using

ig config set disableAnalytics true -g

when using the CLI. You can read Infragistics privacy policy at https://www.infragistics.com/legal/privacy.