MCP setup

Connect IngestMD to your AI editor

IngestMD ships an MCP server. Point your editor at it and the AI can pull this project as clean, area-scoped context, all on your machine. On macOS the app can do this for you in Settings, Connect to your editor. The manual steps below cover every editor and Windows.

First, get the binary on your machine

Install IngestMD, then open Settings, Command-line tools, and Install command-line tools. That puts ingestmd-mcp at /usr/local/bin/ingestmd-mcp on macOS. The snippets below use that path; change it if you installed elsewhere.

Claude Code

Run this once in a terminal (user scope):

claude mcp add -s user ingestmd -- /usr/local/bin/ingestmd-mcp

After it is added, /mcp in Claude Code lists ingestmd.

Cursor

Add to ~/.cursor/mcp.json (merge with any existing servers):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ingestmd": { "command": "/usr/local/bin/ingestmd-mcp" }
  }
}

VS Code

Add to your user mcp.json (~/Library/Application Support/Code/User/mcp.json on macOS):

{
  "servers": {
    "ingestmd": { "command": "/usr/local/bin/ingestmd-mcp", "type": "stdio" }
  }
}

VS Code uses "servers" and needs "type": "stdio".

Codex

Add to ~/.codex/config.toml:

[mcp_servers.ingestmd]
command = "/usr/local/bin/ingestmd-mcp"

Windows

Use the same config shapes, but point command at the Windows binary, ingestmd-mcp.exe inside your IngestMD install folder, for example %LOCALAPPDATA%\\IngestMD\\ingestmd-mcp.exe. The editor config files live under %USERPROFILE% and %APPDATA% (for VS Code, %APPDATA%\\Code\\User\\mcp.json).

What you can do once it is connected

  • Ask your editor to "list the areas in this project", then "load the <area> area" to pull just that subsystem.
  • Bundle a whole repo as context, or assemble task-scoped context for a specific change.
  • Everything runs locally with the same secret redaction as the app.

See the use cases for the bigger picture, or download IngestMD to get started.