Claude desktop remote MCP support

[4rpit]

Hey Team,
First of all, thanks for the awesome work that has been done in this project
I have set up a remote MCP server with OAuth, and it works well with the cursor and inspector

I also understand from the anthropic doc that Claude's desktop does not support remote server integration, but the pro or teams user can set up the connectors - I am trying that, but the MCP server that works with other clients does not work with Claude desktop

Has someone made it work?

[slimwizard]

We were able to get this going with a workaround we found online. You need to use the npx "remote-mcp" package as a proxy so that Claude Desktop sees your remote MCP server as local. The steps we took were:

1. Install npx on machine
2. Update claude_desktop_config.json like so:

{
    "mcpServers": {
      "<server name>": {
        "command": "npx",
        "args": [
          "mcp-remote",
          "https://<server url>/mcp/"
        ]
    }
}  

And that's it!

[4rpit]

Thanks. Is it a server behind OAuth? The one without OAuth works with npx, but with OAuth does not, for me

[slimwizard]

It is currently not protected by Oauth. We are trying to work through that now and unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a straightforward way to achieve this. The FastMCP docs include some information around setting up auth on the server side: https://gofastmcp.com/servers/auth/bearer#basic-setup, but we are seeing issues with Claude Desktop trying to leverage this. Essentially it is saying that our IDP doesn't allow dynamic client registration.