Adding MCP Servers to Claude Code

There is an extensive Claude documentation on how to configure MCP for Claude Code here. The most important part is the scope of the MCP server. Local scope is only for personal test on specific directory, project scope is meant to be version controlled and shared with the team and user scope allows the MCP server to be available throughout your machine.

Examples:

Github

• Add Github MCP with user scope.

claude mcp add --transport http github --scope user https://api.githubcopilot.com/mcp/

• This adds the following config in ~/.claude.json

"mcpServers": {
    "github": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://api.githubcopilot.com/mcp/",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer ${GITHUB_TOKEN}"
      }
    }
  }

where

export GITHUB_TOKEN=$(gh auth token) # in your .zshrc or .bashrc

• gh auth token requires gh cli. Install it with brew install gh.
• or GITHUB_TOKEN is a literal PAT from Github. This is not recommended as it requires us to manage the scope and expiration date for each token created.

Atlassian

• Atlassian mcp server:
  • Claude provides example for Atlassian but it failed to reconnect although authentication was successful. Instead use npx. Add this inside ~/.claude.json, in the top level key "mcpServers" for user scope

"mcpServers": {
	"atlassian": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "mcp-remote", "https://mcp.atlassian.com/v1/sse"]
	}
}

• To authenticate, launch claude and then use the command /mcp. Atlassian uses auth2.0.
• /mcp can also be used to check the connection of all installed servers.

Other helpful MCPs

    "awslabs.aws-documentation-mcp-server": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": [
        "awslabs.aws-documentation-mcp-server@latest"
      ],
      "env": {
        "FASTMCP_LOG_LEVEL": "ERROR",
        "AWS_DOCUMENTATION_PARTITION": "aws",
        "MCP_USER_AGENT": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
      },
      "disabled": false,
      "autoApprove": []
    },
    "playwright": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "@playwright/mcp@latest"
      ]
    }