IBM/mcp-context-forge

pip install mcp-contextforge-gateway
Docker: ghcr.io/ibm/mcp-context-forge:latest
Helm chart (charts/mcp-stack) for Kubernetes; VS Code dev container included

Usage

• •Generate required secrets first: python3 -m mcpgateway.scripts.init_secrets
• •Start the gateway: mcpgateway --host 0.0.0.0 --port 4444 (or uvicorn mcpgateway.main:app)
• •Register upstream MCP/REST servers via Admin UI or API, then bundle their tools into virtual servers
• •Connect clients to http://localhost:4444/servers/<UUID>/mcp, or use the stdio wrapper (python3 -m mcpgateway.wrapper)

Key features

• ✓Tools Gateway: MCP, REST, and gRPC-to-MCP translation (via server reflection) with TOON compression
• ✓Agent Gateway: A2A protocol plus OpenAI-compatible and Anthropic agent routing
• ✓API Gateway: rate limiting, auth (JWT/OAuth/Basic), retries, reverse proxy
• ✓OpenTelemetry observability with Phoenix, Jaeger, Zipkin and other OTLP backends
• ✓Admin UI (HTMX + Alpine), transport over HTTP/JSON-RPC/WebSocket/SSE/stdio/streamable-HTTP, 40+ plugins, Redis-backed multi-cluster federation

Caveats

• ⚠JWT_SECRET_KEY and AUTH_ENCRYPTION_SECRET are required in every environment, including local dev
• ⚠arm64 is not supported in production containers (Apple Silicon needs Rosetta or PyPI install)
• ⚠Sample/test MCP servers in mcp-servers/ are unsupported and should not run in production; never run untrusted MCP servers directly on the local filesystem
• ⚠Strict SSRF defaults (SSRF_ALLOW_PRIVATE_NETWORKS=false) on Helm