Connect your AI apps to your community with Discourse’s built-in MCP server

News and Events Announcements
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Discourse now has a built-in MCP server, so you can ask your favourite AI apps to find a topic, catch up on a discussion, or prepare a report on activity in your community.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is a way for AI apps to use tools provided by another service. Discourse provides those tools, and you connect your app by signing in with your Discourse account and approving the access it requests. :slight_smile:

The server runs as part of your Discourse site. There exists a separate discourse-mcp package, and that’s a tool you install and run locally - it isn’t required for this new feature. You can connect directly to your community’s new built-in server without setting up a local development environment. Scroll through for a look :backhand_index_pointing_right:t2:

1a admin mcp page
1a admin mcp page2886×1995 452 KB

1b mcp capabilities
1b mcp capabilities2210×1762 430 KB

1c oauth clients
1c oauth clients2210×1762 329 KB

1d client authorizations
1d client authorizations2210×1762 405 KB

1e activity
1e activity2210×1762 262 KB

What can you do with it?

You can search and read topics, explore categories and tags, look up user profiles and activity, and check your bookmarks and notifications. With write access enabled, your app can also create topics, reply, edit posts, save drafts, and upload files. PMs have their own read and write permissions.

For example, you could ask:

  • “Find discussions about setting up SSO and summarize the approaches people have tried. Include links to the topics.”
  • “Read this topic and ELI5”
  • “Find my saved draft and help me figure out where I stopped”

There are also tools for chat, events, reactions, solved topics, and topic voting when the corresponding plugins and MCP tools are enabled.

One great feature is support for moderation and site settings. Staff with appropriate access can inspect the review queue, read the details behind a flag, check post revisions, and look up a user’s moderation history. Admins can also find site settings and update supported settings.

Who can access what?

As admins, you choose which tools your site exposes and which permissions each group can grant to an app. Read and write permissions are separate, so you can allow searching and reading without allowing changes.

by default, admins have all scopes
by default, admins have all scopes2210×1004 208 KB

Users sign in to Discourse and approve the app’s requested access. The app acts with that user’s normal Discourse permissions, within the access granted to it.

:warning: Giving an app permission to read content doesn’t give the user access to content they couldn’t already see. All typical app permissions still apply no matter what MCP scopes are allowed to the user. To repeat: A user granted the PM scope will not be able to see a PM they can’t otherwise see in the app. Site setting tools require an admin account, and secret setting values aren’t exposed.

You can review connected apps and authorizations, revoke access, block a client, and inspect tool activity from the MCP admin pages. Users can also revoke their own connections under Preferences → Security → MCP Apps.

user preferences
user preferences1766×1426 241 KB

Setup

The MCP server is disabled by default. On a Discourse version that includes this feature:

  1. Go to /admin/config/mcp and enable mcp_server_enabled in Settings.
  2. In Capabilities, enable the tools you want your site to expose. New tools are disabled until you explicitly enable them.
  3. In Access, choose which groups can connect and which permissions they may grant. The admins group is pre-registered; add other groups as needed.
  4. Connect your AI app using the server endpoint shown on Overview, typically https://your-community.example/mcp.
  5. Sign in to Discourse and approve the requested access.

Your app needs to support remote MCP over Streamable HTTP and OAuth. Some apps can identify themselves automatically. If your app needs a pre-registered client, use OAuth clients → Add OAuth client and enter the matching client details in your app. The form includes presets for common applications.

The mcp_oauth_client_id_metadata_policy setting controls whether apps can identify themselves through a client metadata URL. You can allow any domain, restrict this to approved domains, or require pre-registered clients.

Here’s a full recording [1] of connecting ChatGPT to Meta’s MCP server (only available to admins) :video_camera:

Try it out :woman_technologist:t2:

Let us know which app you’re using and where the tools could use some improvement!

There is more work here coming:

  • more scopes / tools
  • and we’re exploring creating official plugins for well-known apps like ChatGPT, Claude, etc.

  1. Some parts sped up ↩︎

9 Likes
Built-in MCP server
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This is great. I’ve been following the project since its beginnings in the repositories. Its publication comes right after I found issues (most likely due to my lack of knowledge) when trying to use the previous client from a proxy to cover similar purposes.

I’ll use it, and after doing some tests, I’ll publish how it works and looks from Pi, which is a lightweight harness, for those of us who prefer to choose what to use, what not to, and keep everything lightweight.

Enabling the server for the staff grants extraordinary possibilities that would otherwise be impossible to provide.

Congratulations to the team!

I wonder if there are plans for allowing the built-in Meta MCP server to users?

I have some workflows, prompts, and general usage tips that can be helpful for the community, and using the MCP server can simplify the time needed for publishing all of it.

2 Likes
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