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Design and Publish MCP Servers

Prerequisites

Create an Organization

If you're signing in to the API Platform Console for the first time, create an organization.

  1. Go to API Platform Console and sign in using your Google, GitHub, or Microsoft account.
  2. Enter a unique organization name.
  3. Read and accept the privacy policy and terms of use.
  4. Click Create.

This creates the organization and opens the organization home page.

Create a Project

  1. Go to API Platform Console and sign in. This opens the organization home page.
  2. On the organization home page, click + Create Project.

  3. Enter the following details:

    Info

    The Name field must be unique and cannot be changed after creation.

    Field Value
    Display Name Sample Project
    Identifier sample-project
    Description My sample project

  4. Click Create. This creates the project and takes you to the project home page.

Create an MCP Server

API Platform provides two ways of creating MCP Servers. On the project home page, select MCP Server to view the available options.

Create MCP Server

MCP Servers for HTTP backends

This option lets you create an MCP Server based on any HTTP API you have.

Create MCP Server from contract

MCP Servers for existing API Proxies

If you select Start from Existing Proxy, you will get the following view. Here, you will get the option to select an existing API Proxy in API Platform.

Create MCP Server from proxy

Important

Although the MCP Server is associated with the API Proxy, their lifecycles are not tightly coupled. As a result, unpublishing or undeploying the API Proxy can disrupt the MCP Server created using it, so it’s important to manage these actions carefully.

Info

The MCP Servers created in API Platform currently support 2025-03-16 specification.

Modify Tools of your MCP Server

You can modify the details of the Tools of your generated MCP Server by navigating to the Policy section under the Develop menu. The default tool names and descriptions are generated by API Platform based on the information available in the API contract.

Edit MCP Tools

The following options are supported when modifying the Tools

  1. Add new Tool - You can create a new tool by selecting the + icon at the top. You have to provide the name and description at this stage. The schema will be auto generated once you create the mapping to the REST resource
  2. Edit Tool details - You can modify the tool name and description of each tool by clicking on the Tool icon. The tool schema cannot be modified.
  3. Delete Tools - By default tools are created for all the resources of the API proxy or the backend service. You can remove unwanted ones by deleting the tool.

Tip

Clear and well-defined tool names and descriptions make it easier for LLMs to recognize and use the tools effectively. If the auto-generated versions don’t meet your needs, you should feel free to customize them to better suit your use case.

You have to redeploy the MCP Server after saving for the new changes to be reflected in the gateway.

Test the MCP Server

You can test the MCP Server in the development environment before promoting it to production. API Platform provides an MCP Playground for this purpose.

Info

Tool calling via the MCP Playground is currently not supported for MCP Servers created from existing APIs.

  1. Select MCP Playground under the Test section.
  2. Select Development from the environment drop-down list (If you have deployed the API to other environments, you can select the respective options as well).
  3. Click on Get Test Key if the test key is not populated

  4. Click on Connect to connect with your deployed MCP Server.

    Info

    This will send an Initialize call to the MCP Server deployed in the gateway and establish a connection to the server.

    MCP Inspector

  5. You can select and call individual tools by providing the parameters if necessary.

Publish the MCP Server

Important

If you already have a Devportal themed published, please republish the theme before publshing the MCP Servers to Devportal.

Once you verify that the MCP Server is working as expected in the development environment, you can promote it to production.

  1. In the left navigation menu, click Deploy.
  2. In the Development card, click Promote.
  3. In the Configuration Types pane, select the option Use Development endpoint configuration and click Next.

The Production card indicates the Deployment Status as Active when the MCP Server is successfully deployed to production.

If you want to verify that the MCP Server is working as expected in production, you can test the API in the production environment using the inbuilt MCP Inspector.

Now that your MCP Server is deployed in both development and production environments and can be invoked, the next step is to publish it so that consumers can discover and subscribe to it.

  1. In the left navigation menu, click Develop and then click Lifecycle. This opens the Lifecycle page, where you can see the different lifecycle stages of the MCP Server. The default lifecycle stage is Created.
  2. Click Publish.
  3. In the Publish MCP Server dialog, click Confirm to proceed with publishing the MCP Server with the specified display name. If you want to change the display name, make the necessary changes and then click Confirm. This changes the lifecycle state to Published.

Discover MCP Servers through Developer Portal

You can view the published MCP Server via the Developer Portal.

In the Lifecycle Management pane, click Go to DevPortal. This takes you to the MCP Server published to the API Platform Developer Portal.

Info

If you need to do MCP specific customization to the Developer portal, please refer the MCP Hub documentation.

MCP Devportal landing

Go to the MCP Server listing page using the left navigation menu and select your MCP Server

MCP in Devportal

MCP consumers can discover the available tools through this view. Additionally, sample configurations for setting up the MCP Server with an MCP Client can also be obtained from here.

Connect the MCP Server with MCP Clients / AI Agents

MCP Servers in API Platform are secured by default. To access them, you must subscribe through an application, obtain a valid token, and configure it in your MCP client.

For more information regarding managing applications, please refer this.

Please refer this section to get an idea on how you can manage subscriptions to an application. Subscribing to MCP Servers is similar to how you subscribe to API Proxies.

Important

If you created the MCP Server using an existing API Proxy, you need to subscribe to both using the same application.

Once you have the subscriptions in place, you need a valid OAuth2 token to connect with the MCP Server. You can refer to the Generate Keys section to get more information on how you can obtain a token.

If you are using VS Code Copilot Agent to test this out, you can copy the MCP Server Configuration from the overview and add that as a server configuration in VS Code’s mcp.json.

  1. Replace the placeholder with the token you generated in the previous step.
  2. Start the server through VSCode. If everything runs smoothly, it will connect within a few seconds and automatically detect the MCP Tools exposed by your MCP Server.
  3. Now you can try out the tools through the chat option in copilot.

Important

If you are using another AI Agent or an MCP Client, you need to configure the MCP server urL and set the authorization token appropriately.