Cloudflare

You can run a remote MCP server on Cloudflare Workers, connect it from local development tools, and deploy it for remote access. This guide walks you through using the server locally, connecting with the MCP Inspector and Claude Desktop, deploying to Cloudflare, and debugging common issues.

How to use

Connect to your MCP server from an MCP client to explore tools, run commands, and orchestrate interactions with the server. You can use a local development server to test everything, then connect a remote client once you deploy the server to the cloud. The MCP Inspector lets you browse available tools, authenticate, and call endpoints. Claude Desktop can be configured to talk to your MCP server, either locally or remotely, enabling a graphical workflow for tool invocation.

Practical usage patterns include: starting the local server for development, launching the MCP Inspector and connecting to your local SSE endpoint, configuring Claude Desktop to point at the local or remote server, and reviewing tool responses in the inspector or the Claude UI. When you deploy, you will use a cloud URL (https://...workers.dev/sse) to connect from the inspector or Claude.

How to install

# Step 1: Install required tools
- Node.js (latest LTS) and npm
- pnpm (optional but recommended)

# Step 2: Install project dependencies and run locally
git clone https://github.com/cloudflare/ai.git
cd ai
pnpm install
npx nx dev remote-mcp-server

# Step 3: Open the local server in a browser
# You should be able to access http://localhost:8787/

To connect the MCP Inspector to your local server, start the inspector and point it to the local SSE endpoint, then log in with any email and password to proceed.

# Start the MCP Inspector
npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector

# In the inspector, set Transport Type to SSE
# URL: http://localhost:8787/sse

Additional sections

Deploying the MCP server to Cloudflare involves provisioning a KV namespace for OAuth state, updating configuration, and deploying the worker. The process requires creating an OAuth KV namespace and updating your wrangler configuration before you run the deployment command.

# Create the OAuth KV namespace for Cloudflare access
npx wrangler kv namespace create OAUTH_KV

# Follow the guidance to add the namespace ID to wrangler.jsonc

# Deploy the worker
npm run deploy

Debugging

If you run into issues, you can restart Claude or connect directly to the local MCP server from the command line to verify reachability. You can also clear local authentication state if needed.

npx mcp-remote http://localhost:8787/sse

If you need to remove residual authentication data, you can delete the local MCP auth cache directory.

rm -rf ~/.mcp-auth