GitHub MCP Server is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server designed to seamlessly integrate with the GitHub API, providing developers and tools with advanced automation and interaction capabilities.

📦 Introducing GitHub MCP Server

GitHub MCP Server is an official open-source tool released by GitHub, based on the Model Context Protocol (MCP). It operates in a local environment, providing LLMs (Large Language Models) with access to the GitHub API via Docker or an executable file, supporting rich automation and interaction capabilities.

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• Release Date: April 4, 2025, public preview released.
• Optimization Goals: Initially, Anthropic provided a reference service. GitHub then rewrote the complete functionality in Go and enhanced tool descriptions, added code scanning support, and more.

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🛠️ Key Features

1. MCP Toolset: Includes repos, issues, pull_requests, code_security (code scanning), notifications, and more, totaling 7 default modules.

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⚙️ Installation and Usage

Docker Method

1. Pull the image: ghcr.io/github/github-mcp-server
2. Example startup (using VS Code):

{
  "command": "docker",
  "args": [
    "run", "-i", "--rm",
    "-e", "GITHUB_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN",
    "ghcr.io/github/github-mcp-server"
  ],
  "env": {
    "GITHUB_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN": "${input:github_token}"
  }
}

• You can customize the feature set, dynamic loading, read-only mode, and custom host (GHES) via the GITHUB_TOOLSETS, GITHUB_DYNAMIC_TOOLSETS, GITHUB_READ_ONLY, and GITHUB_HOST environment variables.

Command Line Method

1. Clone the source code and execute:

cd cmd/github-mcp-server
go build -o github-mcp-server
export GITHUB_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN=<token>
./github-mcp-server stdio

2. You can configure the stdio channel in clients such as VS Code / Claude Desktop to use this binary.

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🧩 Use Cases

• Automation Workflows: Automatically create issues, pull requests, comments, merge, code scanning, etc.
• AI-Driven Development: Combined with AI clients like Copilot Chat and Claude Desktop, allowing models to provide intelligent suggestions and code reviews based on GitHub context.
• Data Collection and Analysis: Build robots to crawl data from repositories for statistics and analysis.
• Enterprise Cloud Service Integration: Supports GitHub Enterprise Server / Cloud, configuring private instances via the GITHUB_HOST environment variable.

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⚙️ Configuration Example Overview

Usage Method	Configuration Method	Description
Docker	Environment variables or command-line arguments	Set token, toolset, read/write permissions, host
Direct Binary Execution	CLI or env	Similar to Docker, suitable for CI/CD pipeline integration
VS Code config	.vscode/mcp.json or user settings	Shareable project configuration
i18n / Tool Description Customization	github-mcp-server-config.json	Change prompt messages or multi-language support

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🔧 MCP and Security

• Supports --read-only mode to lock to a non-writable state.
• MCP itself may also bring security risks. Community research has pointed out potential attack methods. It is recommended to use it with security audit tools (such as MCPSafetyScanner, etc.).

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📝 Summary

github-mcp-server is a tool developed by GitHub based on the Anthropic MCP protocol, designed to standardize the presentation of GitHub API functionality to AI models. It features high configurability, a secure mode, and is integrated into mainstream AI clients (VS Code Copilot Chat, Claude Desktop, etc.), making it suitable for "AI-driven development" and CI/CD automation scenarios. However, it is still necessary to pay attention to the security risks of MCP itself and use it in conjunction with audit tools.