[BUG] Project-level MCP's not available in /mcp
Status Fixed / completed
Maintainer reply ✓ Yes — ollie-anthropic
Activity 8 comments · opened Jul 17, 2025 · closed Jul 22, 2025
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (ollie-anthropic, collaborator)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
Environment
- Platform (select one):
- [x] Anthropic API
- [ ] AWS Bedrock
- [ ] Google Vertex AI
- [ ] Other: <!-- specify -->
- Claude CLI version: 1.0.54
- Operating System: macos 15.5
- Terminal: iTerm2
Bug Description
claude-code is unable to see project level MCP's.
Given this .mcp.json in project root:
{
"mcpServers": {
"filesystem": {
"type": "stdio",
"command": "bunx",
"args": [
"@modelcontextprotocol/server-filesystem",
"/tmp"
]
}
}
}Steps to Reproduce
Add any project-level mcp server.
Start claude-code.
Check /mcp command.
Expected Behavior
Project-level MCP to be visible
Actual Behavior
No MCP from the project level is available
Additional Context
<!-- Add any other context about the problem here, such as screenshots, logs, etc. -->
8 Comments
You can also observe the error happening by switching the "project" flag to "local" when adding the MCP server with
claude mcp addand see claude instantly use the mcp correctlyHey @MichaelHindley - thanks for reporting! so the same MCP server works locally but not in the project?
I'm unable to reproduce this myself. You must run claude at the same level as .mcp.json, such that ./mcp.json is relative to it. Are you sure this is the case?
hu @ollie-anthropic , yeo claude is running in the same directory as the .mcp.json. Running with debug flag there is also no entry about looking at the file or for it. Ill try to make a recording when at my desktop
Thanks @MichaelHindley - a video would be appreciated!
我也碰到相同的問題
@ollie-anthropic ok so here is a follow-up, sadly I nuked the state for a video so I don't think there is any value in that particular format.
In the repo, I had always run claude with
--dangerously-skip-permissions, now I ran it one time with justclaudeand saw a message like:│ Do you trust the files in this folder?│with these options:
<img width="1478" height="283" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/587e553f-9e4e-439c-b2c1-27ddac6029ee" />
After selecting 1, everything started working as expected . I just had never run claude without the flag to skip permissions before, it seems that if you do that, project-level MCP's fail siltently, even with --debug flag set there is nothing in the logs about it.
I reproduced this exact flow in a different folder, run
claude --dangerously-skip-permissionsand it will not see the local project MCP's. and it wont inform anything to the user about what's going on.<img width="1879" height="895" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/81d21da9-3eac-49f3-aca1-66c24790da92" />
After selecting 1) here, the mcp works with both
claudeandclaude --danger...a suggestion would be to trigger the "allow MCP" even if the flag is passed, or to just enable them since the flag is "dangerous" anyway, but that's more of a product decision.
Thanks @MichaelHindley -
It looks like you may be disallowing the mcp servers via your settings.json (see
.claude/settings.jsonfor your project settings, and~./.claude/settings.jsonfor your user (global) settings. Likely at some point you rejected the permissions for that tool, and it got saved that way.I understand this is all very unclear and unideal at the moment - i hope to make this much better promptly.
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