Forage

What isaac-levine/forage MCP server does

isaac-levine/forage MCP server acts as a discovery and proxy layer for MCP tools. Instead of manually configuring every MCP server before an agent session, an agent can search available servers, inspect a package, request an installation, and then call the installed server's tools through Forage.

Searches cover the Official MCP Registry, Smithery, and npm. The evaluation operation provides package details such as its version, download information, README summary, and installation command. This gives an agent a step between discovery and installation for checking a candidate package.

Forage also records information about installed tools. Its learning operation writes usage instructions to supported agent rule files, including CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, and .cursor/rules/, so later sessions can reuse that guidance.

How it works

After an MCP server is installed, Forage starts it as a child process and connects to it over the MCP stdio transport. It discovers the child server's tools, registers them with namespaced names in the Forage server, and forwards future tool calls to the child process.

Forage sends a tools/list_changed notification after a successful installation. Clients can therefore see newly available tools during the current session rather than waiting for a restart. Installed servers are represented in a local manifest, and Forage attempts to start them again when it launches.

State is stored under ~/.forage/. The manifest contains installed tools, commands, arguments, and auto-start settings. An installation log records install and uninstall activity, while registry search results may be cached.

Setup and configuration

The npm package is forage-mcp. For Claude Code, the documented setup command is:

claude mcp add forage -- npx -y forage-mcp

For Cursor, the README documents:

npx forage-mcp init --client cursor

Forage is intended to run locally and does not use a remote backend. Registry searches make read-only GET requests to public APIs. Environment variables needed by an installed child server are supplied during installation and are not persisted by Forage.

Tools and capabilities

The MCP interface provides these operations:

• forage_search searches the supported registries for MCP servers and tools based on a capability description and returns ranked results.
• forage_evaluate retrieves package information before installation, including version, downloads, README content summary, and an install command.
• forage_install installs and starts an MCP server as a proxied subprocess. The call must include confirm: true, which prompts the user to approve the installation.
• forage_learn writes instructions for using an installed tool to supported agent rule files.
• forage_status lists installed and currently proxied tools, their servers, and installation state.
• forage_uninstall stops and removes an installed tool, updates the manifest, and cleans up related agent rules. It also requires confirm: true.

Limitations and notes

isaac-levine/forage MCP server currently installs npm-based MCP servers through npx -y; support for pip, Cargo, and Homebrew packages is listed as future work. It cannot install a tool without explicit approval through the confirmation parameter. The project does not store child-server secrets, so those servers must receive their required environment variables at installation time.

The server depends on the target MCP package being available through the supported installation flow. Forage provides discovery and proxying, but the capabilities, configuration requirements, and behavior of each installed server remain specific to that server.