Discourse MCP is here!

[Falco]

As soon as Anthropic open sourced their Model Context Protocol (MCP) proposal for interfacing with AI agents almost a year ago, we started getting excited about how good of a match it was for Discourse. 

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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.discourse.org/2025/10/discourse-mcp-is-here

[Falco]

Here is a good example of workflows that are possible with Discourse MCP, Discourse → Jira integration

[RGJ (Richard - Communiteq)]

Impressive, although I’m surprised you’re using Jira and not Discourse

[Falco]

I know you are joking, but was going for an good illustrative example for large companies with many channels for customer support who centralize things on Jira for historical reasons

Does anyone have more ideas for integrations like that? I could do a couple more screencasts.

[jrgong]

This is how I feel about this

But in all seriousness, fantastic addition.

Where can we find the final documentation about possible arg values and all available commands/tools?

For example, I would like to add the MCP to my IDE but limit it to specific categories such as Development and Documentation > Developer Guides

[Falco]

@jrgong

Where can we find the final documentation about possible arg values and all available commands/tools?

Documentation is maintained at GitHub - discourse/discourse-mcp: MCP client for Discourse sites · GitHub

This also shows in the UI of your MCP client, for example Claude Code shows

@jrgong

For example, I would like to add the MCP to my IDE but limit it to specific categories such as Development and Documentation > Developer Guides

Currently you can prompt your way there with something along the lines of:

When searching or filtering, via discourse_filter_topics or discourse_search, append category:dev,documentation to the query so you only search relevant information.

[jimmy0017]

Question for using Discourse MCP. If a user uses MCP, does that count towards their login date? so they can get Devotee badge easily?

[RGJ (Richard - Communiteq)]

The Meta TOS forbids to use this anyway

You may not automate access to the forum, or monitor the forum, such as with a web crawler, browser plug-in or add-on, or other computer program that is not a web browser. You may crawl the forum to index it for a publicly available search engine, if you run one.

[Jason_Hsia]

Great news, and this sparks all good moonshot ideation. I would love to see Discourse MCP available on Cursor. This will open up the door to community users of all levels on dev or coding. This integration would serve a bountiful source of use cases and practical feedback.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

@Jason_Hsia

I would love to see Discourse MCP available on Cursor

Oh, it is, you just need to add it to your mcp config

[jrgong]

So far, the MCP works like a charm!

But another question: Is there any way to add an argument to retrieve a specific translation of the topic?

Our use case: We have a large KB in German which is then translated to English. Our maintainers are German speakers with limited English skills.

Hence, we would like to maintain content in German but retrieve the localized English content.

Is that achievable?

[Falco]

Not currently, but adding an extra parameter to the read tool to pass a locale would be a good feature.

[jrgong]

It might be related to my feature request here: Support for tl=[lang] parameters in REST API (for non-anon users)

From a user perspective, it would be great to have an identical parameter and set of values for MCP as well as the REST API.

Does that make sense?

[jrgong]

@falco do you accept PRs? While the discourse MCP has a tool to create new categories, there is no permissions argument.

I could submit the following PR:

Proposed Changes for Discourse

src/tools/builtin/create_category.ts

• Update zod schema to accept an optional permissions field.

  • Type: z.record(z.string(), z.number()).optional().

  • Description: Map of group names to permission levels.

  • Format: { "group_name": permission_type_int }

  • Permission type values (from Discourse schema):

    • 1: full (See, Reply, Create)

    • 2: create_post (Reply only)

    • 3: readonly (See only)

• Pass permissions in the payload to client.post('/categories.json', payload).

[Falco]

Yes, feel free to send PRs.

[rey.riel (Rey)]

Super excited about FEATURE: add user management and file upload tools by SamSaffron · Pull Request #36 · discourse/discourse-mcp · GitHub

It would be nice to be able to leverage the API internally to be able to ask questions about customers, employees, etc, which is a bit limited by the “get user” tool (no ability to see email or groups).

Anything I can do to poke someone about getting this added ASAP?

[SkhemaDeveloper (Michael Lovell)]

Just looking for confirmation - are the ‘write’ tools publicly available? I’ve set the —allow_writes flag and configured admin api keys, but still can only access these 8 tools across Claude Code and Cursor.

[SkhemaDeveloper (Michael Lovell)]

FIxed - not sure if it was when i created the api_key i wasn’t logged in as ‘system’. Changed to system > generated a new key and now it is working!

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

A new release should be out now!

I hear you on the limitations of get users, email would have to be reserved to admin api, but it should be doable, as would be groups.

I don’t want to explode tool counts so we need to be careful about how much we add.

Will have a think tomorrow!