MCP Gateway Overview

The MCP Gateway (also known as Context Forge) is the central hub for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), providing:

• Service registry & discovery: Agents register themselves and advertise their “tools” (capabilities).
• Request routing: All requests go through a single HTTP gateway, which dispatches them to the correct service.
• Security & authentication: Supports Basic Auth for user/admin access, and JWTs for fine‑grained, time‑limited tokens.
• Health monitoring: Built‑in /health endpoint for readiness checks.
• Local & production modes: Can run locally in a Python virtualenv or be containerized.

Key Components

Component	Location
Makefile targets	top‑level Makefile
Setup script	scripts/setup-mcp-gateway.sh
Start/stop scripts	scripts/start-mcp-gateway.sh, scripts/stop-mcp-gateway.sh
Verification script	scripts/verify_servers.sh
Core code	mcpgateway/ directory
Default config template	.env.example

Getting Started (Local Python Mode)

1. Setup environment
   bash make gateway-setup

This runs scripts/setup-mcp-gateway.sh to:

• Check OS compatibility (Ubuntu 22.04 recommended)
• Install Python 3.11 if missing
• Install OS packages: git, curl, jq, etc.
• Clone or update the IBM/mcp-context-forge repo at a pinned commit
• Create (or recreate) a Python 3.11 virtualenv
• Install Python dependencies in editable (.[dev]) mode

• Copy .env.example → .env if needed

• Start the gateway

make gateway-start

Invokes scripts/start-mcp-gateway.sh, which:

• Activates virtualenv
• Loads .env vars
• Initializes the SQLite (or configured) database
• Launches mcpgateway on $HOST:$PORT (default 0.0.0.0:4444)

• Waits (up to 2 minutes) for /health to return {"status":"ok"}

• Verify it’s running

make gateway-verify

Runs scripts/verify_servers.sh, which checks:

• HTTP /health endpoint
• Admin /servers list (using JWT‑based admin token)

• Any additional smoke tests

• Stop the gateway

make gateway-stop

Runs scripts/stop-mcp-gateway.sh to kill any running mcpgateway processes.