MCP Server (AI Assistants)

Pitchfork includes a built-in Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, allowing AI assistants to manage your daemons directly.

What is MCP?

MCP is an open protocol that lets AI assistants interact with external tools via JSON-RPC over stdin/stdout. Pitchfork's MCP server exposes daemon management operations so AI coding assistants can start, stop, restart, and monitor your development services.

Setup

Claude Desktop

Add to your claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pitchfork": {
      "command": "pitchfork",
      "args": ["mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Cursor

Add to your Cursor MCP configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pitchfork": {
      "command": "pitchfork",
      "args": ["mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Other MCP-Compatible Tools

Any tool that supports the MCP protocol can use pitchfork. The server communicates over stdin/stdout using JSON-RPC.

Available Tools

The MCP server exposes five tools:

Tool	Description
pitchfork_status	List all daemons and their current state (PID, status, errors)
pitchfork_start	Start one or more daemons by name (supports force for restart)
pitchfork_stop	Stop one or more daemons by name
pitchfork_restart	Restart one or more daemons (equivalent to start with force)
pitchfork_logs	Return recent log output for one or more daemons (default: 50 lines)

Usage Examples

Once configured, you can ask your AI assistant things like:

• "What daemons are running?"
• "Start the API server"
• "Restart the worker daemon"
• "Show me the logs for the API"
• "Stop all daemons"

The AI assistant will use the MCP tools to execute these operations through pitchfork.