One-click MCP installs with npx

A few weeks back I shipped the PyAirbyte MCP service for Airbyte. This service relies on OpenAI and Vector Embeddings to create an entire data pipeline with a single prompt. All you had to do was provide a source and destination from any of the hundreds of connectors available in the Airbyte Registry.

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"create a data pipeline from source-postures to destination-data bricks"
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The service has been getting heavy usage, which is always great. The biggest bit of feedback that I receive though, is "I wish it ran in Claude/Cline/Replit/etc".

The initial release was shipped as a remote MCP server running on Heroku. This implementation relies on the user passing in their OpenAI API key, which the server uses, along with the vector embed search, to determine how to generate the right code. All sounds great until you dig into the how different vendors implement the mcp.json spec. At the time of publishing the MCP, only Cursor allows the passing in of environment variables within mcp.json for remote servers. I wanted to ship v1 as fast as possible, so I decided to only support Cursor -- not a bad thing if a million developers already use it, right?

"pyairbyte-mcp": {
      "url": "https://pyairbyte-mcp-7b7b8566f2ce.herokuapp.com/mcp",
      "env": {
        "OPENAI_API_KEY": "your-openai-api-key"
      }
    }

NPX - the secret ingredient

After shipping v1, I wanted to find a way to easily allow developers to add the MCP server to whatever AI tool they wanted. I'm a big fan of Cline for my IDE and Claude Desktop as my AI Guide to the Galaxy. With a little digging, npx seemed to the secret ingredient.

NPX is a CLI tool for installing and managing dependencies of a host npm package on npmjs.com. Since NPX is a CLI tool, you can execute it as part of the mcp.json spec:

"fast-pyairbyte": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["fast-pyairbyte"],
      "env": {
        "OPENAI_API_KEY": "your-key-here"
      }
    }

From my testing, all of the major apps that support MCP.json handle npx great. To the app it is just another local execution. To the user, it is a single step install. Here is the MCP running right within Claude Desktop.

Try it for yourself

The MCP is now an official package on npmjs.com, under the name fast-pyairbyte. Cursor still leads the way in terms of developer experience to install an MCP server with one click installs:

If you are using Cline, Claude, or pretty much any other tool, you can add Fast PyAirbyte by including the json snippet into the relevant config files:

For Cursor (.cursor/mcp.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "fast-pyairbyte": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["fast-pyairbyte"],
      "env": {
        "OPENAI_API_KEY": "your-openai-api-key-here"
      }
    }
  }
}

For Claude Desktop (~/.config/claude/claude_desktop_config.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "fast-pyairbyte": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["fast-pyairbyte"],
      "env": {
        "OPENAI_API_KEY": "your-openai-api-key-here"
      }
    }
  }
}

For Cline (~/.config/cline/mcp_settings.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "fast-pyairbyte": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["fast-pyairbyte"],
      "env": {
        "OPENAI_API_KEY": "your-openai-api-key-here"
      }
    }
  }
}